Mike Lee

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Ah, here we see it. So on the ``MAGA extremists''--an extremist for saying that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't be paying the salaries of Ukrainian bureaucrats to the tune of $8 billion for an entire year; maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't give them an assistance program that will also enable them to continue whatever welfare programs they have, whatever economic assistance programs they have in place to buy concert tickets, to keep clothing stores running as they see fit. If that is what passes for extremism in America, then I think you have just labeled all Americans extremists or, at least, the overwhelming majority of us. Keep in mind, once again, I am not even asking that this be adopted. That is not what she objected to. I am not asking that it be passed into law, not asking that it be adopted even into the bill. I am just asking that it be made pending so we can debate it, we can discuss it, and we can vote on it. You know what we heard the other day from these Republicans in the Senate who voted on cloture on the motion to proceed to the bill so we could get on the bill? What we heard from them was: Don't worry. We will have an amendment process. You will be able to offer up amendments, have them voted on, have them debated. You will be able to do that. Well, that is not really materializing, is it? It is not. It is not materializing. I just asked to make this pending, and it didn't happen. For that, I am called an extremist. Good heavens, what have we come to? I see that some Members of the U.S. Senate object to even modest measures protecting Americans, protecting their money from being wasted, stolen, or misused for nondefense-related purposes, for purposes that are very, very difficult to connect to any benefit on the part of the American people. If that makes me an extremist, what have we come to? It doesn't. My colleagues know that. And my colleagues know that most Americans would be concerned to know that we can't even make an amendment like this pending. It is a pretty modest reform. It is not too much to ask. Oh, we are a fine, fine steward of America's finances. No wonder our country is $34 trillion in debt, much to foreign adversaries like China. What a disgrace. Proponents of never-ending U.S. support for Ukraine, including many of my colleagues--including, unfortunately, apparently, 17 of my Republican colleagues--want America to pick up the tab for the rebuilding of Ukraine postwar. We know this bill perpetuates something we have seen before, which is a really dangerous and vicious cycle of obligation for the United States on rebuilding Ukraine and leaves U.S. taxpayers on the hook for massive corruption. How do we know this? Well, because the same model was used to keep the United States entangled longer than we should have been in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. How did that turn out, that regime change, turn out for us, for example, in Afghanistan? A fail. A subtle democratic change, a stable democratic government favorable to U.S. interests toppled. It didn't happen. By the way, in those circumstances, I suppose one could have even made a slightly better argument for nation-building. I still didn't support that then, and we shouldn't have been doing it, but at least I understand the argument better for that kind of nation-building, reconstruction postwar in a nation where we had actually been waging war ourselves as Americans. Here we are, not even the people at war. We are just the people perpetuating that war, funding that war. We are funding it to the tune of 12 figures, money we won't ever get back and money, if we keep feeding it, that is probably going to obligate us even more. Waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars was rampant in those countries. It will be even more rampant here. So I am introducing an amendment that would prohibit any funds of this act being used for reconstruction and activities in Ukraine. Democracy is a result of dependency on the United States. It doesn't work out so well. I am not sure it ever does. Let's not ignore this history lesson yet again. Unanimous Consent Request--Amendment No. 1443 Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to set aside all pending amendments and motions and make my amendment, Lee No. 1443, pending to the text of Murray No. 1388.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, there have been a lot of discussions over the last few days about a bill--a bill many months in the making; a bill that has been discussed, debated, and drafted, largely in secret. We saw it for the first time Sunday evening, at 7 p.m. eastern time. That bill has a lot of material in it. As it was released to us Sunday night, it spent somewhere just shy of $120 billion. Since then, it has gone through some changes. It now spends just a little under $100 billion, about $95 billion. And it has been modified. Its scope has been narrowed. I want to talk, first, just for a few minutes about how we got here or where we are in that process and then about some concerns I have with the bill as it now stands. Last fall--the fall of 2023--there was a push spearheaded primarily by the White House but a push that included most Senate Democrats and some Senate Republicans--a push to get more aid to Ukraine. Now, remember, the total aid the United States has spent on Ukraine throughout the duration of this conflict is somewhere in the neighborhood of $113, $114 billion. It is an enormous amount of money. The military aid component of that itself--at least until fairly recently--was more than the military aid provided by any other country or any other group of countries. It is an enormous sum of money. All of this is going on at the same time that the American people are enduring some challenges--challenges that relate to an economy in which the dollar can purchase less and less every day. This is the inevitable, foreseeable, and, in fact, foreseen and widely warned of consequence of a government--this government based here in Washington, DC--that has been spending too much money for many years, that has been spending money to the tune of trillion-dollar and then multitrillion- dollar deficits year after year after year. This has happened, by the way, not during a widespread economic depression but, really, during the top of an economic cycle in which most of the last few years, unemployment has been really low. These are not things that the government has borrowed to spend more money on because of the fact that the economy has been severely sluggish and, therefore, unable to produce as much output as we would normally hope to have. No, this is just regular government spending run amok at the peak of the economic cycle. And as a result of this spending--this spending that has involved multitrillion-dollar deficits for the last few years, including and especially during this Presidential administration--that many years of adding that much debt to our already gargantuan national debt, which now stands above $34 trillion, those things have a consequence. When we add that much debt--especially that much debt that quickly--because of the way in which the acquisition of new debt works in the United States, it has the same basic effect on the economy as just printing more money. Essentially, what is happening here is that we are contributing to the money supply; we have turned up the pace at which we are contributing to the money supply; and as a result, every dollar buys less. How much less? Well, depending on which study you point to, a very conservative estimate is that the average American household has to spend about $1,000 a month every single month to buy the same basket of goods and services of basic necessities--from housing to healthcare, from gas to groceries--$1,000 a month more every single month to buy just the same basic necessities that they were buying prior to the day President Biden took office. And that is not very long. That does produce an effect. And it produces a type of misery that looks something like the following. Now, if people are on a salary, one way or another, it is a relatively fixed budget that most households operate on and, usually, a relatively fixed sum of money that they have to live on, whether that is through a salary or through a combination of sources, if they are independent contractors or if they are retired and live on a pension or something like that. So that sum of money now has to take into account that everything costs about $1,000 a month more for basic necessities every single month, working out to about $12,000 a year. For some families, this may be more; for some, it may be a little less. But everyone is feeling the pinch. It is what happens with inflation. It hurts everyone. But it hurts the poor, middle-class Americans more than anybody else. Rich people, interestingly enough, can find a way to get even richer, even faster, during times of great inflation. So it is one of many reasons why we ought to be concerned anytime we are going to spend a significant sum of money--a significant sum of money that is in addition to the ordinary operations of this government, the Federal Government--the government based right here in Washington, DC. That is why it is important to think about what we are spending, how we are spending it, why we are spending it, and what consequences that spending might have. For many of these same reasons, when this latest push to provide tens of billions of additional dollars over to Ukraine a few months ago, a number of Republicans, a number of Members--mostly Republicans, including Republicans in the Senate and Republicans in the House of Representatives--expressed concern over doing that. There was a wide range of concerns expressed. And I won't attempt to enumerate all of them. But I will just say that most of them followed along a few things. No. 1--the one that I just mentioned--inflation. The fact that we are spending a lot more money than we have, that causes inflation to become worse. The more we add to that dumpster fire, the more misery inflation is likely to create. No. 2, this money is going to a war, a war half a world away, to which we have already contributed substantially. We have European allies that are much closer to the action--European allies that have provided some aid, provided far less military aid than we have; who have not been as quick to defend their own backyard turf as we would like and not nearly as quick to defend their turf as we have been as a country. This matters. This matters in a number of ways. Remember, many of these allies of which I speak that are much closer neighbors to this conflict, much closer to what is happening there, much more likely to be affected by the conflict in a direct way, are countries that belong to NATO. Remember, through NATO, for decades, the United States has been providing a significant portion of the European security umbrella, an umbrella that has benefited not only NATO allies but also their neighbors for many years. Now, an understanding has evolved over time. There should be a certain percentage of GDP that NATO allies should be contributing to NATO. A certain percentage of their GDP should be devoted to security, to defense. A lot of those nations have not kept up with this and have missed it chronically and by a pretty significant margin. We have continued to provide our portion of the security umbrella to NATO, which is huge. It is enormous. It allows it to operate. It allows these nations to rely, to a significant degree, on our security umbrella. Year after year, when many of those nations failed to fulfill their duties, their part of the expectation of what it means to be a NATO member, in time they get trained. They get acclimated to the fact that, hey, this is OK. This is a pretty good deal. As a result, they can spend money on whatever else they want. They can spend more money on their social welfare programs or whatever it is that they spend money on in Europe--maybe it is more wine, cheese, I don't know--whatever their governments are spending money on that is not defense when they fail to meet their NATO obligation. So as a result of that, they grow more and more dependent on what we spend. Then, when there is a bad guy--Vladimir Putin--with a country-- Russia--who goes in and without provocation attacks Ukraine, again, for the second time in a decade, then they look to us. It is understandable why they do that. They looked to us for a long time. We have shouldered a lot of burdens around the world. And in many respects, we have a lot to be proud of for that. But this is a conversation that needs to happen because at what point should they have to match--no--at what point should they have to exceed as a percentage of GDP, perhaps collectively, those European nations in real dollars, what we have spent before we consider putting more on the line? That is a significant concern. Some have also expressed the concern that we are devoting all this time, attention, and an enormous sum of money to securing Ukraine's borders when our own borders are insecure. We have been flooded with what some estimate to be about 10 million people who have come into this country without documentation since January 2021 when Joe Biden took office. They wonder why we are doing so much to secure the borders of another country half a world away while doing little or nothing to secure our own. Some have also noted, whenever we get involved in a proxy war-- spending a lot of money through another country to fight yet another country--that is very often how we get involved in a much larger conflict. This wouldn't be the first time that has happened or the second time. It has happened a number of times. The most familiar one people think of is Vietnam. We start out with proxies. We build, we get drawn in, and we are eventually direct combatants. It is worth considering, worth taking into account, not necessarily dispositive of whether we get involved in any war, but this is a war we have been fighting through a proxy--Ukraine--against an adversary-- Russia--with a very large nuclear arsenal, one that is large enough to destroy the United States many, many times over. That has to be taken into account. That question becomes more meaningful every time we invest more money, every time we increase the lethality, the type of weapons assistance that we are providing to them. Those all need to be taken into account. Sometimes we don't have those conversations. For those and other reasons, a number of people, mostly Republicans--Republicans in the House and Republicans in the Senate--have expressed some concern about providing additional Ukraine funding. Last fall, when this push started in earnest, Republican leadership in the Senate suggested: Look, maybe what we should do, given that most or all Democrats in the Senate really want this funding to Ukraine, and we have some Republicans who want to be supportive but not as many-- maybe we should offer up something else to achieve a compromise, to achieve something else that is important to most, nearly all--I would hope all Republicans in the Senate--and that is U.S. border security. So for the last few months, we have anticipated what would come of some negotiations, which, unfortunately, became a lot more clandestine than I would have preferred. I speak not critically of our negotiator, James Lankford, who is a dear friend and a good man. I think he was doing the best he knew how to do with the cards he was dealt. But those negotiations, to my great dismay and disappointment and that of many of my colleagues, occurred without our day-to-day awareness of what was happening. We were not kept informed of exactly what was in there. We were given very few details, and those details emerged mostly in the last few weeks before this document was made public Sunday night at 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, when we finally saw that measure. The reason why we shouldn't have months of secret negotiations in which most Senate Republicans were kept out of the loop became more apparent. The objectives of the negotiating team had drifted pretty far from the original stated concerns of many, if not most, Senate Republicans when we embarked on this process. The idea was to use the fact that we have a lot of enthusiasm on our side of the aisle to secure America's border and to pass legislation that would force that, that would virtually guarantee that, that would make it very difficult--very difficult to the point of being impossible--and that we would continue to set all the wrong records, as we did in the month of December and as we have so many times during this administration, on the number of people coming across the border, the number of people trafficked into the United States by international drug cartels. The drug cartels, by the way, are earning many billions--probably tens of billions of dollars--every year smuggling human traffic into the United States and with that human traffic are bringing in a whole host of other problems carried by them and inextricably intertwined with the human traffic they brought into the country, including enough fentanyl that in the last couple of years has killed over 100,000 people per year, enough fentanyl that if distributed widely enough, could kill every American living in this country, every single man, woman, and child. I was told by the Border Patrol during a recent visit I made to the border in the Rio Grande Valley that for the first time since the 1860, since the adoption, in fact, of the 13th Amendment prohibiting slavery and indentured servitude in America, we now have significant numbers of people living in indentured servitude, many of them in the form of sex slavery, paying off the debts that they incurred while being smuggled into this country by the drug cartels. There was a lot of enthusiasm, for that reason, to stop that, to make it more difficult for that to continue. And that was the whole point of merging those efforts. So when the legislation came out Sunday night and we saw that--you know, while there were some changes in law that might have been helpful over time--there was nothing in there requiring the border to be materially more secure. There were enough loopholes in there, as I read it, enough loopholes in there that not only did it not guarantee a significantly better result on border security, but in some respects it could actually make some problems worse. It could at least prolong the problem. Those concerns were expressed. On a dime, it seemed, Senate Republican leadership turned on that very legislation they had been touting for months: It is under development. Wait until you see it. Instead of trying to fix that, instead of saying: All right, let's go back to the drawing board and see where the problem areas are, what we can fix, what we can't fix, they said: Let's not do it at all. They started quoting Republican Senators, Senators like me who had said the President of the United States can use existing law. And with that existing law, he can make material steps toward securing the border to the same degree that was achieved in the last administration using the exact same laws; that the border security crisis, as we see it now, is not itself something that exists for want of adequate legislative authority in the hands of the President. No, it is a willful choice on the part of the President and the Secretary of Homeland Security not to enforce those laws aggressively; in fact, in many cases not to enforce them and in some cases to openly flout the law, as he has, by admitting a couple of million people into this country under so-called immigration parole authority, parole authority which is supposed to be used only on a case-by-case basis and never a categorical basis, as it has been recently by this administration, to admit millions of people into this country. The President still could enforce the border. Republican leadership then made the unfortunate choice to say: Well, you Republicans who care about border security have been saying it is not the lack of adequate legislative authority that the border is not being enforced. Therefore, you guys shouldn't be pushing for any border security language at all, so we will jettison that part. That was never the point. The point was we were going to achieve a compromise. True compromise between the party should entail getting one thing one party likes and another thing another party likes and enough steam for both of them to pass when neither of them can pass. So they missed the point. By missing that point, they also missed a real opportunity, perhaps, to get something done there. That is unfortunate. Now, we still had a chance. I made the case over the last few days that we could still offer up something. In order to do that, Republicans would have to come together, and they would have to debate both of the cloture motions we had over the last 48 hours. And after defeating both of those, say we are working on a proposal that could actually get us there--one that could include material reforms, like H.R. 2, which has been passed by the House of Representatives. I know it is something that Senate Democrats don't necessarily dream about passing--not necessarily wild about it--but it is something that would materially advance the cause of border security and materially change the circumstances on the border. Even though the President doesn't have to have new legislative authority, this would force that, and we could force that by harnessing the enthusiasm for Ukraine aid. But, alas, 17 or 18 Senate Republicans chose last night to move forward--or yesterday afternoon, rather--to move forward and vote for cloture on the motion to proceed, notwithstanding the fact by then, they had cut off anything having to do with border security. This was unfortunate. We waited for months for this language. This language didn't do the job. We could have come up with other language, but we had to stick together as a team. So much for teamwork. That didn't pan out. That really is tragic. We now find ourselves faced with a bill that focuses on this supplemental aid package, an aid package of $95 billion, the vast majority of which--close to two-thirds--goes to Ukraine. Some of it goes elsewhere. We will talk more about that in a moment. There is a lot in here, a lot to cover, but let's start with the fact that in addition to the aid sent to Ukraine or sent to the Pentagon to replenish stockpiles of weapons that have been released to Ukraine under Presidential drawdown authority or otherwise, in addition to all that, it provides some $238 million--roughly a quarter of a billion dollars--to cover deployments of U.S. troops to Europe. That is significant. It begs all kinds of questions. Why is that happening? Where is it going exactly? If we are doing that, does that mean we are getting ready to be involved directly or kinetically in this war? What does that mean? Why are we doing this, by the way, without a plan, a comprehensive strategy for Ukraine? What is it that we want to achieve? How far are we willing to go to get there? Are we going to be directly involved? At what point will we be adopting or must we consider an authorization for the use of military force or a declaration of war? All those questions are left unaddressed by this as we spend roughly a quarter of a billion dollars on additional troop deployments to Europe. It allows for an additional $7.8 billion worth of weapons to leave our stockpiles, U.S. stockpiles, immediately. This is a pretty big sum of money. Now, keep in mind that for many of these weapons, especially many of the weapons that seem to be the most talked about and the most useful here, a lot of them, including the weapons systems known as HIMARS, Javelins, ATACMS--those are things that are being deplenished, have been depleted very rapidly from our stockpiles, as we have been sending them to Ukraine. They also happen to be many of the same weapons that may become very valuable, very much in demand, and very much are now in short supply should additional need for them break out in, for example, Taiwan or Israel. So as the planet is becoming a more dangerous place and we are depleting those, yes, we are authorizing an additional $7.8 billion of weapons to leave our stockpiles immediately. Now, why is this significant? Ordinarily, there is a default rule set into law that says you can't have more than $100 million in weapons leave our stockpiles through Presidential action alone without a new law being passed by Congress to allow that--$100 million, one-tenth of a billion dollars. This is many times that. And I understand that this is a deliberate choice. Congress can do that. After all, it is a statute that imposes a cap. Congress, having adopted that cap, can increase or decrease the cap anytime it wants to. But let's think about why. Let's think about how much this makes sense. Let's think about whether and to what extent this is in our interest--$7.8 billion. This is almost 80 times, about 78 times the ordinary drawdown authority that we would allow absent some extraordinary action. Now, when those weapons are released--as many of them already have been under previous authorities--we are still looking at years before many of them can be replenished. This is not stuff that we can just produce tomorrow. You can't just turn on a switch or place an order. This is not like ordering a new set of double-A batteries from Amazon. No, this takes a fair amount of time. In fact, for some of these weapon systems--many of them, in fact--I am told it may well be impossible for us to replenish them prior to 2030. Who knows where we will be then. Who knows what conflicts might require their use by then. And will we find ourselves unprepared? One can easily imagine scenarios in which we could. If we have to engage, for example, in the Indo-Pacific in the near future--let's say Beijing fulfills the fears of many for years and decides to make a move on Taiwan--what happens then if our shelves are barren, left barren because of this conflict? I think that needs to be discussed more than it has been. That is one of the most unfortunate offshoots--and there are many--of the way this bill has been handled over the last few months. We put it on the back burner while it has been negotiated and negotiated, we thought initially--we hoped, believed initially--under terms that would involve our being apprised and informed regularly about what was happening and allowed to see text. That didn't happen. When we finally saw text, that text didn't contain what most of the Senate Republican conference asked for at the outset. Now, because of concerns with that part of the bill, that part of the bill was just jettisoned, and we are back to just the foreign aid stuff to be spent mostly in the same three areas we had talked about at the very beginning. As a result of all of that, it is as though there has been a distraction. One could use this to distract people from conversations like this one. So we shouldn't be rushing this one. We should have conversations about that and figure out whether it makes sense and what we are going to do in order to protect ourselves in current and such future conflicts as may arise, as to which we have no ability to predict right now. The legislation also allows for the Department of Defense to enter into new contracts for a total of $13.7 billion in new equipment--new equipment specifically for Ukraine through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative--with no requirement whatsoever for the Biden administration to prioritize contracts for our own readiness, for America's defense. Why should we be worried about that? Well, as we are worried about replenishing the stockpiles of the weapons I just referred to a moment ago, we are placing new orders, new contracts, new money--$13.7 billion for additional weapons--and those are all going out without any obligation on the part of the Biden administration to negotiate in a preference for a priority basis for weapons to be used by the United States to be placed back in the U.S. stockpiles. Where does that leave us? Well, I think it leaves us back in a similar position to what I described a moment ago. Look, our military is the most feared force in the world with good reason. We have the best and the brightest men and women in the whole world ready to fight for us at a moment's notice, and we also have the best weapons systems in the world. But when you get to be king of the hill, as our military currently is and I hope will be for the entirety of the time I am on this planet and I hope in perpetuity, you don't get to that point and then consider yourself immune to the risk of being thrown off that hill. The minute we deplete our weapons stockpiles is a moment that we should be concerned. The legislation also funds the Ukrainian National Police. It funds the Ukrainian National Police and State Border Guard in Ukraine with $300 million. That is great. I am glad that Ukrainians are concerned about Ukraine's borders--enough that they have apparently asked us for this assistance--but this bill contains nothing to secure our border. Last I checked, Ukraine is not being besieged by immigrants from all over the world, including a lot of people on the Terrorist Watchlist, including people from countries as far from Ukraine as the United States is from Afghanistan and Syria and China and all kinds of countries that are not in or connected to Latin America. See, that is another thing I learned on my most recent trip to McAllen, TX, from the Border Patrol, who told me that this is not what we have seen in the past, not what we normally expect to see coming across the borders. You have people from all over the world, including parts of the planet where there are a lot of people who don't like us very much and are known to plant people, to come into our country without let's say gestures of good will on their minds--yet another reason why this bill should give the American people pause. It should give us pause. If we are willing to spend that on Ukraine's border security, why not ours? Yes, I know they are at war, and that is significant. That is tragic. Yes, Vladimir Putin is a bad guy, and we don't want him to be able to pursue his ambitions. Our job first and foremost is to protect this country. When we can protect other countries half a world away, we ought to have that discussion, and we ought to have that discussion in a way that makes very clear to the American people how that benefits them directly, how that makes them safer. I don't mean to suggest that any of these questions are easily answered, but I do mean to say emphatically that American border security, which is at risk in ways that it never has been not just in my lifetime but in the entire existence of this country--at least since the end of the War of 1812 but in other ways, since it came to be--we are in deep trouble with our border security. People are pouring across who do not mean us well, and we have to be concerned about this. This bill turns a blind eye to that, even while fetishizing border security in another nation half a world away. I don't think the American people will take enormous comfort when they hear these and other concerns, when they learn that $7.8 billion to be sent to Ukraine through this legislation will go to ensure that Ukrainian bureaucrats don't miss a paycheck. We send this thing over as part of the economic support fund for Ukraine, and it is there, as I understand it, to make sure that every government employee in Ukraine doesn't miss a paycheck, gets paid for an entire year. Billions of dollars to subsidize all kinds of things in addition to paying their government workforce. My understanding is that it is also going out in various grants to subsidize everything from clothing stores to people who sell concert tickets for Ukraine, all while making sure their budget is fully funded for an entire year. All this is happening while Americans are living paycheck to paycheck and where that paycheck doesn't last very long, like it used to, because they have to shell out an additional $1,000 a month every single month, and this trend has been ongoing ever since January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden took office, and, not coincidentally, this inflationary cycle steadily became worse and worse. The bill also begins Ukrainian reconstruction. Now, this one is interesting. In most parts, it sends $25 million for the transition initiatives account of USAID, and it sends this out for frontline and newly liberated communities, communities reclaimed from previous Russian occupation. There are a couple things about this that concern me. No. 1, I am not aware of a lot of communities that have been reclaimed. I am sure there are some. I am told there are a few, but they are few and far between. Sending $25 million--I suppose the only reason it is that small a number--you know, most Americans think of $25 million, and they say that is an enormous sum of money, and it is. It certainly is. And that has been hard-earned by the people who have paid it. But compared to the rest of this bill, it is a tiny drop in a very large bucket. So why should that be concerning? Well, for setting the predicate now for the fact that it is going to be the United States on the line--U.S. taxpayers on the line most notably--in order to fund these transition initiatives. Does that mean we are going to be responsible for rebuilding Ukraine as, if, when this war is won? Is that our job? Do we have to rebuild these buildings? Is it a hard-working mechanic from Denver, a plumber from Boston, a police officer from Provo? Why exactly are their paychecks and their dollars and their bank accounts and their hard-earned money being tapped for that? And more to the point, if they are going to be on the hook not just for these isolated, Marshall communities, then does that mean if--when--this war is finally won, we will be doing all of that? They will be concerned about that, and they have every reason to be. (Mr. OSSOFF assumed the Chair.) Now, the legislation does ask for a multiyear strategy for Ukraine, and it is a good thing to have a strategy. I wish we had a strategy for how this war is going to be won and how our role in it helps bring an end to that and how to prioritize different actions that we might undertake and what they might cost, what they might entail. But this strategy of which I speak places the United States at its helm, and as I understand it, it doesn't do the things that I just described that need to happen, but it does put the United States at the helm, sort of in a pole position, as the people in charge of this outside of Ukraine. I am not sure that is a great idea. It seems like yet another gift to woke and complacent European allies already not meeting their NATO obligations that refuse to own up to the responsibility of protecting and securing their own continent in their own backyard. Now, that takes us to another area of concern, to a different part of the world. The nearly $10 billion for humanitarian aid in this bill-- somewhere between $9 and $10 billion when you add up a couple of accounts--that by the terms of the legislation may be used in and around Ukraine and in and around Israel, some of that money, one has to assume--in theory, all of that money--could end up going to Gaza, humanitarian relief in Gaza. Of course, there are dire humanitarian conditions in Gaza, and that is heartbreaking. But there is nothing in this bill that, as I view it, prevents that money or such money as goes to Gaza from ending up in the hands of Hamas and benefiting Hamas. And as I look at--I am not sure there is a way to do it. And that is one of the reasons why I am concerned that there isn't a restriction on aid to Gaza here because Gaza itself is under the thumb, not of a state, not of a government as we would conceive of it--it is unlike anything we have ever known here and hopefully anything we ever will know on this continent, certainly in this country. But to say we are going to give aid to Gaza, but without it benefiting Hamas, it is almost impossible to conceive of. Let's remember what has happened in the past with other conflicts where we have sent humanitarian aid to other entities, places like, I don't know, Afghanistan, for example. Don't worry. This is humanitarian aid, and it is not going to get into the hands of al-Qaida and its affiliates--the bad people in Afghanistan who rule over Afghanistan with an iron fist--and it did. It empowered them. It emboldened them. It ultimately helped arm them. We are fooling ourselves if we think this is going to be any different. So it troubles me that we didn't draw a hard line there, acknowledging that almost any aid that we make available for Gaza is going to end up helping Hamas. And when you help Hamas, you are helping Iran and its proxies wage a war of terror, not only against Israel but against the United States, against Western civilization. This should concern all of us: Democrat, Republican, Independent. I don't care. It should be worrisome. We saw the devastation that rained down on Israelis who had, themselves, done nothing--nothing--to deserve this on October 7. We saw the inhumanity unfolding there. It is the tip of the iceberg compared to what they want to do, what they have promised to do, what we may well unwittingly equip them to do if we are not careful, and we have not been careful here. Shame on us. It also perpetuates the cycle of endless, unconditional wars in the Middle East, wars bought and paid for by the United States. It encourages escalating conflicts in the region to the tune of $2.4 billion going to Central Command, risking direct engagement with Iran. Whenever we do this, we risk that. There is so much in this bill that risks imminent conflict with Iran, and you don't think we are talking about that? We have been so caught up talking about the palace intrigue associated with these phantom border security provisions that we didn't get to see for months. And when we saw them, we had concerns about them. And when we voiced those concerns to Republican leadership, we were told too bad, too late. We are going to characterize you as the reason this failed, and we are not going to consider anything else. We are going to join up with the Democrats to support cloture on the motion to proceed to legislation that unites the Democrats--all but one in yesterday's vote--and sharply divides Republicans. What were there? Seventeen Republicans who voted to support them. Uniting Democrats, sharply dividing Republicans, while advancing Democratic policy interest. This is deeply concerning. I want to get back to Gaza for a moment. I think a lot of Americans would be absolutely shocked and horrified to learn that Congress has almost no visibility into how our funds are used within the United Nations and other multilateral globalist organizations. With Ukraine alone, our own government admits that ``routing U.S. assistance funds to Ukraine through multilateral institutions . . . where U.S. donations will merge with funding streams from other international donors [and that that] has the potential to reduce transparency and oversight.'' So I use this here in the context of Gaza by comparison. We know what we are doing. This is not a surprise. When we put money out there into the stream of international commerce, into the stream of international government-to-government business dealings, we know full well that that is going to end up in the hands of others, will be placed, in turn, in the hands of others. And before we know it, we have lost any opportunity to have transparency or to achieve any degree of oversight. So why would we expect that routing our assistance for Gaza through the United Nations will be any different, that it will be 1 degree different. We shouldn't. We are foolish to think that. In fact, think about it: decades of the United States bankrolling the entire United Nations' system. We are, by far, the United Nations' largest benefactor, much to my dismay. We have been for some time. But decades of the United States bankrolling that whole system in the United Nations has made taxpayers complicit in all sorts of things that Americans don't like, don't want, and have every reason to oppose. But somehow we, and the United Nations, end up being shielded from this because of how many times those dollars change hands. Well, it is not on us anymore. It is on this person. It is on the United Nations. The United Nations says: Well, we give it to this entity. We give it to that entity. Before you know it, nobody is in charge. Nobody is accountable for where the money went, how it was spent, and whether it harmed those who worked many hard hours to pay their taxes in the United States to fund those things. And in doing that, we made taxpayers complicit in all kinds of things: in terrorism; in blatant, virulent forms of anti-Semitism; and in the indoctrination of generations of children living in Gaza. That is one of the reasons why, once we are past this phase, once we are past the motion-to-proceed phase--assuming we pass it, which appears far too likely for my comfort--I will be introducing an amendment, an amendment to clarify that not only will our dollars stop funding UNRWA--which, mercifully, this legislation does. Mercifully, this legislation says none of it can go to UNRWA, a U.N. entity that has been particularly problematic in promoting anti-Semitism, violent rhetoric, advocating for acts of violence against Jewish people, and other hateful rhetoric. Not only will our dollars stop funding UNRWA, but they will no longer fund any U.N. organization operating in Gaza. Look, we have been down this road before, funneling our aid dollars through multilateral institutions, and we know exactly how this ends. Without my amendment--I have got others, lots of others, in fact--but without this particular amendment of which I now speak, there is nothing in this bill to prevent the administration from taking funds that would otherwise have gone to UNRWA and redirecting them to any of the or any combination of the nearly 2 dozen other U.N. entities that happen to operate in Gaza, where we lose all visibility into where our dollars end up and how they are used. Look, enough is enough. Like most multilateral institutions supported by the United States as the principal benefactor or not, the U.N. is a bloated, corrupt system far past its prime, and it has proven adversarial to U.S. interests, interests of the United States as a whole and of its people. A truly just outcome would be for us to stop funding the United Nations overall, and I have been advocating for that. But that is a discussion point for a different day. But the point here that I have to make is that we can't trust this administration not to fund U.N. programs in Gaza, and we can't trust the U.N. not to fund terrorists, which is exactly why my amendment is urgently needed. Before I close, I also want to talk about another amendment that I will be introducing--again, this is a nonexhaustive list--but another one that needs to be mentioned here is one that imposes restrictions on the economic support fund in the legislation, the economic support fund relative to Ukraine. Every dollar in economic aid in this bill for Ukraine really is, as written, it is a slap in the face to every hard-working American battling the cost-of-living crisis created by Bidenomics here at home. Now, economic aid isn't going to win the war for Ukraine. On the contrary, economic aid may, at best, prove to be a waste of money, may, at worst, end up prolonging the conflict, prolonging the problems and the agony from it by masking the true cost to Ukrainians and to Europeans, more broadly, of this conflict. Americans would be furious to learn that billions of dollars out of their paychecks are subsidizing clothing stores and concert tickets for Ukrainians, while families here live paycheck to paycheck. Now, some of my colleagues called the billions of dollars in economic assistance provided to Ukraine a small amount. Really? Economic assistance makes up 34 percent of the $113 billion in assistance the United States has already provided to Ukraine. Calling that a small portion is an insult to every struggling American, every American family struggling to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. But leaders of both parties will tell you that this bill will cut economic aid to Ukraine. Well, that is a lie. One doesn't cut aid by adding to it. And let's be clear: Providing $7.8 billion instead of Biden's initial boondoggle request of roughly $11 billion is not a cut. It is simply starting with a larger number only to reduce it. It is not a cut. The bill, as written, mercifully prohibits pension pays out of that economic assistance fund, but it allows American tax dollars to keep paying the salaries of Zelenskyy and his bureaucrats. Now, my colleagues have also said that cutting economic aid to Ukraine in this bill sends a message to our European NATO allies to step up and do more. But make no mistake, this is a laughable attempt at burden sharing. Look, my time is expiring. I will be back. I will be back to speak more of concerns that I have with the legislation and ways that I have come up with that, if passed by this body prior to passage of this bill, could make some things better, could make some things less bad. I think, at this point, that may be the best thing we can do. We will do everything we can do it. Make no mistake, this bill is a mistake. It has been written in the wrong way, and it serves the wrong people. Our job, first and foremost, is to do no harm to the American people, and, on that front, this bill fails miserably.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, we find ourselves in a situation in which every State in America is a border State. Now, it didn't used to be this way, and as one who has spent 2 years living along the U.S.-Mexico border, where I served as a missionary in my early twenties, I am familiar with border towns; I am familiar with what they go through. And I can tell you from that experience, where I lived and worked among the poorest of the poor along the border, among a lot of people who were recent immigrants themselves--some documented, others not documented--I can tell you that no one fears uncontrolled waves of illegal immigration more than people living along the border, including and especially those who are recent immigrants. It is, after all, their jobs, their neighborhoods, their children's schools, their communities that are placed at risk every time there is an uncontrolled wave of illegal immigration. Now, since I lived in border communities in the early 1990s in South Texas, things have gotten a lot worse, and they have gotten exponentially worse over the last 3 years. Things got so bad in the last month that we were setting all kinds of the wrong records. Day after day, we were exceeding the maximum number of daily migrant encounters our Border Patrol had ever observed in the history of our country. These are not the kinds of records that we want to break nor are they the kinds of records that, when broken, are without consequence--very real, very tangible consequences--to the American people, starting, of course, with those living in border communities, but extending through all 50 States as all 50 States are seeing, feeling, experiencing, and paying the cost--the high cost--of this wave of lawlessness. It is not a victimless crime. Just as the drug cartels are being enriched to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars a year--smuggling their human traffic across international boundaries--and just as the human traffic that they carry, it is bringing in enough fentanyl that it killed over 100,000 Americans last year and enough fentanyl that, if distributed to enough people, would kill every American many times over. When that many people--we are talking somewhere in the range of 8 to 10 million people; maybe it is even more--enter a country unlawfully in such a short period of time--in just 3 short years--there are all sorts of consequences to that. Among them happens to be the erosion of the rule of law. When that many people come into the country and their first experience with this country--their very entry into this country's borders--is itself an unlawful act, it doesn't bode well for the rule of law in America. It doesn't send a positive signal for what kind of country we are becoming. We have experienced that in every one of our States. We have seen crimes committed that should never have been committed because they were committed by people who should never have been in this country to begin with. All of this is before we even get to the question of who exactly is coming across our border. Our Border Patrol agents have observed all kinds of things in recent months and years but especially in the last few months. People are not just coming from Central America anymore-- and not just coming from Central and South America--but from all over the world, from all kinds of countries that you ordinarily wouldn't expect to be represented in large numbers crossing illegally across our southern border into the United States--countries like Afghanistan, like Syria, like China, and many, many others. We have seen many hundreds coming across who are on the Terrorist Watchlist--known terrorists. We have seen a whole lot of others--many hundreds by some measures, thousands who have likely entered--who are from countries, and otherwise entering under circumstances, that are cause for alarm. Yet this is going on with the acquiescence--some would say with the blessing--of a Presidential administration which appears to have ordained this very result--invited it and effectively guaranteed it. This has been really good for the drug cartels, which have been enriched to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every single year that Joe Biden has been in office--every year. But it has been really bad for the American people, especially America's poor and middle class and anyone living on or near a border or in any community where people have been displaced or where people have been ravaged by the effects of criminal activity carried out by those who should never have been in this country to begin with. The problem got so bad over the last few months that the State of Texas decided that it had to act. You see, Texas has a really long international border at the southern end of its State, and along that border, the State of Texas sought areas that were being traversed constantly--traversed constantly and yet, perhaps, were not patrolled as well as they would have liked. These were places where there were no adequate barriers, natural or otherwise, that could keep people out but that the State of Texas knew could be protected if barriers could be placed there. So the State of Texas started putting up barriers along some of these stretches of border and, in particular, along a particular 27-mile stretch of border. The Biden administration struggled to process these many thousands of illegal aliens crossing our border every single day, with all kinds of things to do to try to stop this or, at least, act like they are trying to stop it or, at least, process them or whatever it is that they have been ordered to do that day. Apparently, this was too much for the Biden administration, because President Biden directed the Department of Homeland Security and the personnel along the border in Texas to go in and start taking down these barriers. They were putting up ladders across some of the barriers, cutting holes in other barriers, cutting concertina wire in other circumstances. So the State of Texas said: Good heavens. That doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem right that, you know, we are besieged by these people who want to break our laws in order to enter our country. The President is the chief executive officer of the Federal Government, and it is the Federal Government that is responsible for protecting us from invasion. Remember, an invasion can occur either by an organized, armed military force or it can be a nonorganized, nonuniformed, nonmilitary force that is just entering another country en masse without authorization. That is the Federal Government's responsibility. It is one of the chief responsibilities, one of the most important responsibilities. But because the Federal Government wasn't carrying out that responsibility and because the State of Texas saw a particular 27-mile stretch of border where Texas could make a difference by putting up some barriers, they put it there. But that was not OK with the Biden administration. They had to go take it down. Who knows how many additional illegal immigrants came in as a result of the personnel who had to be deployed to start taking down these barriers and cutting the wire, but they did it. Now, the State of Texas stepped back for a minute and said: You know, it is really unfortunate that that is what the Biden administration wants to do with its scarce resources. It is really unfortunate that they want to make the State of Texas less safe and, with it, the rest of the country. But it also doesn't really seem--I don't know--constitutional. You know, there are a couple of provisions in the Constitution that deal specifically with protecting the country against an invasion. One of them can be found in article IV, section 4 of the Constitution, which says, when a State is being invaded--when it is under siege in some way--it should be able to appeal to the Federal Government for help in resisting that. Well, when Texas asked for help, it got quite the opposite. There is another provision--article I, section 10, clause 3. That provision says, in essence, after telling the States that there are a bunch of things that they cannot do--States are not allowed to wage war, for example; States are not allowed to enter into an international compact with a foreign country and do certain things like that that are akin to what the Federal Government is uniquely empowered to do--that there is an exception at the end, and it is an exception that applies when a State is being invaded; that States have the power to do that. So, perhaps informed by these and other provisions of the Constitution, the State of Texas filed suit in the U.S. district court in Texas, trying to seek an injunction. That is an order telling the Department of Homeland Security: Look, you can't mess with Texas. You can't mess with Texas's barriers. Don't take them down. After some initial back-and-forth litigation in the U.S. district court, the matter went to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which includes the State of Texas. On December 19, 2023, just a little over a month ago, the Fifth Circuit issued an injunction--a preliminary injunction--saying that, while this litigation is pending-- while we figure out once and for all whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances the Biden administration may or may not choose to go in and take down these barriers put up by the State of Texas--Homeland Security and the Biden administration just can't do that. Don't do it for now. It doesn't mean don't do it forever. It just means don't do it for now while this litigation is pending, while the courts are ironing this out. Well, that remained in effect for just over a month. Then this last Monday--just a couple of days ago--the Supreme Court of the United States issued a one-sentence order vacating that preliminary injunction. What does that mean? Well, that order doesn't do anything. It doesn't tell the State of Texas it can't put barriers in place. It doesn't tell the State of Texas it has to take it down. It doesn't require any action on the part of the State of Texas. All it does is it gets rid of the order that previously was in place telling the Department of Homeland Security and others within the Biden administration that they could not do anything to mess with the barriers put in place by Texas. Meanwhile, the case is set to be argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on February 7. At that argument, the court will consider--the appellate court will consider the merits of the argument and, eventually, make a ruling. I hope, I expect, I would imagine that in a case of this import and urgency, the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit will probably try to issue something within a few weeks; I would hope not much longer than that, maybe a month or 2. And at that point, if the State of Texas prevails, then there will be a permanent injunction and order telling the Biden administration it can't take that down. I am sure whoever loses will take that to the Supreme Court. That will take some additional time. But the point is this: Through all this litigation, we have seen one consistent theme through all stages of litigation. We have got the Biden administration going into court, making arguments like the following: pointing to provisions in title 8 of the United States Code dealing with immigration issues, provisions guaranteeing that the Border Patrol must have access to areas 25 miles inland from the border so that they can do their work; so that they can enforce the border; so they can do their jobs. This is one of the primary arguments they were making before the courts is that this barbed wire or these barriers put in place by the State of Texas interfere with our ability as Border Patrol officers to access the land and to do our jobs. What is their job? Well, to stop the illegal immigrants from coming across. So how, exactly, does this 27-mile stretch where these barriers have been put in place by the State of Texas, how exactly does that hinder the Border Patrol from doing the Border Patrol's job? Call me crazy, but I strongly suspect that if we could bring a handful of the Border Patrol agents up, they would tell us that quite the opposite is true; that the placement of these particular barriers probably makes their job easier. But do you know whose job this makes harder? It makes the job of the drug cartel, the human smuggler, the sex worker trafficker--remembering that a very substantial portion--estimates vary as to how many, but according to some, a majority of the women and girls trafficked through this network are subjected to sexual assault, many of them used as sex slaves, many of them forced to continue in that capacity even after they get into the United States, where they are working now as indentured servants, yes. Just a few weeks ago, I went to the border, down in the McAllen sector--not too far from the area where I lived and worked for 2 years as a missionary back in the early 1990s--and Border Patrol officers there informed me that for the first time--for the first time--since the adoption of the 13th Amendment, which got rid of things like slavery and indentured servitude, we have actually got a sizable number of indentured servants in this country--people smuggled in who haven't been able to afford the $4-, $5-, $6-, $7,000, sometimes more, depending on what country they are from and how many risk factors there are. If they can't afford the passage from the cartels, they have got to work it off. So many of them remain as indentured servants. And for many of the girls and women in particular, they remain in sex slavery. So why exactly is the Biden administration so concerned with all of this happening, with the barrier that could make the job of the Border Patrol more effective, that could lead to the apprehension of more individuals--knowing full well that by breaking up these barriers, all they are doing, the only people whose lives they are really making easier are those of the drug cartels, the people who are subjecting all these people to these horrible, deplorable conditions, and bringing in enough fentanyl into the United States every year to kill every American multiple times. Why are they so concerned about that? And on what planet--on what planet--can you maintain that it is making the job of the Border Patrol harder because you are making it harder for people to enter our country unlawfully? It really defies reason, wisdom, and logic. It is against this backdrop that we find ourselves today in a position in which we have got a war going on half a world away, a conflict involving Russia and Ukraine. It is a tragic conflict. You got a bad guy, Vladimir Putin, who is messing with Ukraine yet again. Without getting into all of the gory details--because this is not the focus of my speech today of how that war started, why it has been dragging on so long--there is renewed push to send more U.S. assistance to Ukraine, to send some additional aid to Israel. The votes aren't there to get it passed through both Houses of Congress. So for that reason, they have married up the project of getting more money to Ukraine--you know, it is a $106 billion aid package. We still don't know exactly who would get how much; we still have yet to see bill text on any of that. But we are told that the majority of that money would go to Ukraine. About $12 billion of it would go to fund Ukraine's ongoing civilian government, pay the salaries of its civil servants, and pensions, things like that. A lot of it involves direct military assistance. Overall, we expect about $62 billion or so of the $106 billion would go to Ukraine. The votes aren't there to get it, so some Members of Congress, some Members of the Senate, including both the Democratic leader and the Republican leader, have decided to try a somewhat innovative approach: combine the supplemental aid package with a border security package; marry them up, and then maybe you can get enough votes for both of them. I understand why they have come to the general conclusion. I understand that sometimes you have to pair one thing up with another thing in order to build a consensus necessary to get either passed. It is a common technique used, and I understand it. It is understandable, certainly, why they would want to use it here. But I believe there are some real problems with the manner in which we are going about that particular effort, starting with the fact that it presupposes on the border security front that the reason for the current border surge, for the absolute humanitarian crisis unfolding along our southern border over the last 3 years and over the last few months in particular, is somehow the product of inadequate legislative authority on the part of the President of the United States and those answerable to him and charged with enforcing Federal law. It is not. It is not for want of adequate legislative authority and the executive officials charged with administering those laws; it is not for lack of any legislative authority on their part that we have this border security crisis. The exact same statutes were in place when Donald Trump was President of the United States. Donald Trump faced, as we all recall, some rather significant border surges as the cartels were pushing people increasingly into this country and making a lot of money smuggling them into the country. He utilized existing law to bring that crisis under control. Those same laws are in effect today. President Biden could, should, and would be able to fix this if only he had the will, the willingness, to do it. In fact, if only he didn't have this defiant attitude that convinces him that he would rather help the drug cartels and poor middle-class Americans living in border communities and everywhere else in the United States. Shame on him for not using those. Now, the skeptic will immediately say: Oh, yes, yes. But that was title 42 authority. Title 42 authority kicked in only because of the COVID pandemic in 2020. That is not really true. Look, he did use title 42 authority, and that was pegged to the pandemic. But the crisis was mostly resolved. He was bringing it to a close by the time anyone had even heard the cursed word ``COVID'' or ``coronavirus'' in 2020. It was already well on its way to being a thing of the past, all without title 42. Sure, title 42 didn't hurt, and it helped close the gap even further to the point where we had effectively ended illegal border crossings in 2020. We were well on our way in that direction. The biggest single step with that was not, in fact, title 42; it was the ``Remain in Mexico'' program, also known as the Migrant Protection Protocols--an international agreement whereby the United States effectively entered into a safe third-country agreement with Mexico. If you crossed into our southern border--into our country across our southern border by land--and thereafter claimed asylum, you were asked where you were from, and you were returned back to Mexico because you were deemed eligible to apply for asylum in the first safe country that you crossed into, or at least the country through which you were crossing before entering the United States. So they were returned to Mexico. Asylum applicants applying for asylum, appearing, crossing over land, were told that they would have to wait while their asylum application remained pending in Mexico. This worked like a dream. This dramatically reduced illegal border crossings. It took a significant amount of time by President Trump, by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, by various Department of Homeland Security officials, and a number of other members of the President's team in order to negotiate the terms of the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. And once in place, it worked like a charm. It worked really, really well. You see, because this is where a lot of this migrant surge phenomenon comes from. We have laws in place that offer asylum. Asylum is something that we offer to people who are wanting or needing to come to the United States because they have been targeted for some type of persecution based on their status. You know, we are a nation of immigrants. We always have been. I hope we always will be a nation that welcomes immigrants. And we do. We welcome them a lot. We want them to come the legal way. One of the ways in which we welcome immigrants is through our asylum laws. Now, you do have to satisfy certain statutory criteria in order to even be deemed eligible for asylum. Over the last few years, the vast majority of the people who cross our borders without documentation and thereafter apply for asylum are, ultimately, deemed ineligible for it. I have heard numbers ranging from about 90 percent to 98 or 99 percent. I don't know where the actual numbers shake out. I think they vary from time to time. But we are talking about at least 9 out of 10--often more than that--who are not eligible. So when you have people come in and apply for asylum, the way that it is supposed to work is they are supposed to be detained until such time as their asylum claims can be adjudicated by an immigration judge. They can be found either eligible or not eligible for asylum. If they are eligible: Welcome to America. You are now a refugee. Come on in. And we welcome them. But if they are not, they are supposed to be removed--removed--sent outside the United States; typically, back to their country of origin. The problem has been that we have somehow gotten confused. We have gotten confused over the fact that we are, in fact, supposed to detain them until such time as their asylum application could be adjudicated. We have got it so confused that, over the years, it has morphed into this monster that the drafters of the asylum laws who put it in place would scarcely recognize. It has morphed into this weird thing where they come in, they say: I want asylum. And today they are told: OK. Fill out the paperwork. Tell us why you want asylum. Then they are told: OK. We are going to hold you for a few days. Then they are told: Oh, our bed space is all full so we can't detain you any longer. Then they are told not that they are going to be sent back to their own country, not that they are going to be sent back to Mexico, as they would have been, as they were being under the Trump administration, under the migrant protection protocols, also known as ``Remain in Mexico,'' but here is a plane ticket. We will fly you anywhere you want in the United States, on us. And unlike, amazingly, American citizens, all of whom have to produce a driver's license in order to board a plane, you don't have to worry about that. We don't really know who you are, whether you are who you say you are. But, yeah, go ahead. Here is the plane ticket. We will make sure you get on that plane, and we will fly you anywhere you want. And as for your asylum application, don't worry about that. We just humbly, politely, ask that--at some point, you are going to have an immigration hearing. We ask you to show up to it. And, by the way, if you enter the United States without documentation right now and apply for asylum and get one of these plane tickets and they tell you, ``We hope you will show up for your asylum hearing before the immigration judge someday,'' guess when that will occur? A week? No, longer. Six weeks? No, longer. Six months? Longer. Now it is in the mid-2030s. We are talking a decade or more away from today. So have fun. Enjoy the plane ticket on us. Go to wherever you want in the United States. Oh, by the way, after 180 days, we will even send you a work permit allowing you to work while you are here, even though you are without documentation. We will fix that. We will just make you documented just because you have said you would like to apply for asylum. This is insane. Of course, we have had 10 million people come into this country illegally. When we run it like that, who wouldn't want to come to America? It is the greatest country on Earth. But the problem is, this is really dangerous. It is dangerous for those being human trafficked. It is dangerous for all the people in America who are being killed--100,000 last year killed by the fentanyl these guys are bringing across. It is dangerous for our communities. It is dangerous for people who are losing their jobs because their jobs are being replaced by people who shouldn't be here to begin with. It is dangerous for those who are the victims of crimes that those people who shouldn't be here in the first place commit while they are here--like 10 million people. Among 10 million people, you are going to have some bad ones. I am sure you will have a lot of good people, too, who are just trying to get by, just trying to make a living and not be in a country where they feel they can't get ahead, but it doesn't give them a right to be here. Our asylum laws sure don't. I will tell you why. It is because our asylum laws do not confer an individual right on anyone to asylum--no. This is a discretionary authority given to the Secretary of Homeland Security that he may--he may--grant asylum to those people who fit the criteria for asylum. He may. Remember, you are supposed to keep them locked up. You are supposed to detain them until such time as you can adjudicate the legitimacy of their asylum claims in an immigration hearing, and then you are supposed to deport them if they are not eligible and let them in only if they are. But, instead, we run out of bed space, processing capacity, and we say: Ah, forget it. Here you go. Come on in. We will send you a work permit in 180 days. So, of course, we are going to have this problem. Then, somehow, that wasn't even enough by itself. I don't know exactly why because the asylum track was working real well for the Biden administration to invite more and more drug cartel activity, enriching the drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year. But maybe it wasn't quite enough for the big guy. Maybe he wanted more to come in. So what did he do? Well, he looked for other loopholes to exploit in our immigration laws. So he turned to the parole provisions. Now, parole, when we use it in the immigration context, is typically not talking about what you think about when somebody is out on parole from prison. This is immigration parole. It involves a very specific type of relief that the President and those working under him in the area of homeland security may grant. Again, there is no right to parole any more than there is any right on the part of any individual to asylum. It is a discretionary grant of authority. But it is a narrow one. It is one pursuant to which the President or those answerable to him in the homeland security arena may allow someone in for two possible purposes: either for a discrete, distinct, individualized humanitarian need--now, the classic example of this, the longtime understanding of what that encompasses, it would involve someone outside the United States who doesn't have a visa to come into the United States but whose grandmother is dying or has just died, and he needs to attend the funeral. Parole authority can be granted for humanitarian purposes in that circumstance, with the understanding that he will leave in a few days after the funeral is over. It could maybe be somebody outside the United States who doesn't have a visa here who has a rare medical condition, treatment for which is available exclusively in the United States. He needs to come in for a few days to get that procedure, be treated, with the understanding he will leave soon after getting the treatment. The other prong of parole, immigration parole, exists in the public need, the public purpose arena, where, for example, someone speaks an obscure language not typically spoken in the United States and somebody is on trial in a court somewhere; they need an interpreter, someone who can speak that very rare language. They can't find one in the United States. They want to bring an interpreter in from another country who can speak that language so the person can be afforded due process and a fair trial. That is the type of public need that can be filled with the parole authority loophole. But it has always been understood, it has always been the law that parole is not to be granted en masse. It is to be granted on a case-by- case, individualized basis with individualized findings in all circumstances, nor is it supposed to be open-ended. Parole is not a visa. It is a temporary grant of permission to enter the country for a brief period of time, with the understanding that when that need is over, in a finite period of time, the person will leave. So the Biden administration has now used parole--I believe, last year, last year alone, it was about 700,000 people, undocumented, who were brought into the United States specifically using this parole authority. Now, these were not individualized determinations. These were not 700,000 individual people saying: I have a specific need. My grandma is dying or I need a kidney transplant or whatever it was--or I speak this obscure language nobody else speaks, and I am going to provide interpretation services in a court, and I need to get in so I can get out after doing the job. No. These were massive-scale grants of authority--of permission to enter the United States under the parole authority. So it is against this backdrop that we have to get back to this supplemental aid package. The supplemental aid package promises, OK, let's make lemonade out of lemons. We have got a lemon in that the Ukraine aid can't pass by itself. So let's make lemonade out of it by getting those who want to make sure that we give lots of money to Ukraine--let's pair that up with votes from people who really want to make sure the border is secure. It is really sad, if you think about it, that we are not all in that boat. I mean, look, people can reach different conclusions. Reasonable people can take a different conclusion as to whether, to what extent, in what way we are going to help Ukraine enforce Ukraine's border. That part is considered sort of optional in that it is not our border. Our border shouldn't be optional. That is not an extracurricular activity for us. That is the core of what we are supposed to be doing. Article I, section 10, clause 3 and article IV, section 4 will make that clear, as will a number of other provisions of the Constitution and in Federal statute. This is not optional. But getting back to that compromise: So the idea is to marry up those who really want border security--unfortunately, it is not all of us-- with those who want to make sure that we get money to Ukraine so that Ukraine's border can be protected. It is against that backdrop that I have just been describing that we are faced with that set of issues. So we are told that what we are going to do is negotiate our way into passing new border security statutes and that those statutes will then end the border security crisis created willfully by the Biden administration's vehement, defiant refusal to enforce the law. Wait a minute. Why would we expect them to enforce a new law when they are not enforcing the old law? I am confused. Moreover, if we are going to negotiate this, doesn't that send the message to the rest of the country--the incorrect message--that if this project fails, that President Biden is somehow justified in not doing it because, oh, well, Congress didn't pass the law. I would have enforced the law. I haven't enforced the border for years, the whole 3 years I have been President of the United States, so I guess I can't enforce it now, but I would have under a new law, but I won't under existing law. Why should we take that seriously? Heck, there are a lot of Americans who are looking at this, asking: Why we are willing to spend so much money on other countries and securing their borders but not our own? How can we look those constituents in the eye, knowing full well that, so far, according to the Heritage Foundation's estimates, this war, our support of this war, of Ukraine since this war started, the $113 billion that we have provided, more than any other country on Earth by far, $113 billion of hard-earned American taxpayer dollars--that is real stuff. According to the Heritage Foundation, that amounts to about--it is over $900 per American taxpayer on that conflict. Even at the height of the multiple wars that we were facing in 2008, where we were fighting wars not through a proxy, not just by providing military aid, but we ourselves were fighting wars, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and to a degree in Syria--even that year, at the height of that conflict, the cost per taxpayer was more in the range of $700 or so. But just so far, in the existence of this conflict, we have spent $113 billion already on Ukraine. The American taxpayer is now being asked to spend another $62 billion on Ukraine when we still haven't secured our own border. And it is against that backdrop that we are saying: OK, then we will negotiate into this new border security laws. Now, look, I would imagine there are a few of us who wouldn't vote for all kinds of things, wouldn't at least consider voting for all kinds of things if we were assured, if we really were certain, if we could see the future and predict with a high degree of certainty that if we voted for x, y, or z, whether it is Ukraine funding or something else, that the border would be secure and that it wouldn't be secure if we didn't vote for that thing. But I don't know how I can look my constituents in the face and tell them: Yes, we have got to spend this additional money here in order to get new laws so that President Biden can now enforce the border when I know full well and many of them know full well that he could enforce the border now if he chose to do so. So I struggle with the premise of this at the outset, and I think it does send the wrong message. But the wrong message is only the beginning of my concern with this. The next step: We have got language that has been under negotiation I believe since October. October, November, December, and we are most of the way through the month of January. So we are like 4 months into this thing, into this negotiation. Yet we still have yet to see legislative text. It is a little frustrating. But what little we do know about it, what little we have been told, what little we have been allowed to see--I mean, I feel like a character in ``Oliver Twist,'' asking, ``Please, sir, may I have some more?'' when I am told just crumbs of details about what is in this legislation. What we do know is a little concerning; I will be honest. So we have the asylum problem. We have the parole problem. As far as I can tell, there is no agreement at all. There is not even hope of an agreement on the immigration parole issues, such that we would shut down the 700,000 or so people who were unlawfully brought in under parole authority in the last year alone. From my understanding, there is no agreement at all that would shut that down. And what discussions have occurred around parole deal with custodial parole issues, involving some of these illegal immigrants, which is different than the immigration parole provisions that we are describing. It doesn't deal with that. It does, apparently, tighten the asylum standards in ways that I am told will be helpful but in ways that I have yet to be able to evaluate because I haven't seen the text of the language. It tightens the asylum standard. That might prove to be a nice thing to have. I don't dispute that. But is that what is going to make the difference between the utter defiant nonenforcement of our border and the laws that govern our border and the admissibility of individuals outside of the United States who want to come into the United States? No. No, it doesn't because it remains the case today that asylum is a permissive grant of authority to the Secretary of Homeland Security and not a right--not a right on the part of any individual. And when the system is overwhelmed, the proper remedy should, in fact, be: You are not coming in. We are shutting this down. I, the Secretary of Homeland Security, am declining to grant or process any more asylum applications until we can get this under control. So it is shut down. That leads me to another feature that we have been told just a little bit about as to the new proposal: that it creates a new authority whereby the President and the Homeland Security Secretary can just shut down illegal crossings along the southern border; that they can do it, if they choose, once we have 4,000 migrant crossing encounters per day. And they shall do it once we have at least 5,000 migrant crossing encounters per day. It sounds intriguing. I really want to see this language. There are a thousand different ways that could be written. And that, too, could be helpful, but there are things about it that also scare me to death-- things that, if they are written just a little bit wrong, could actually make matters worse. Let me explain. Let's suppose, for example, maybe--just maybe--this is written in such a way as to say that, once we have reached 5,000 migrant encounters per day, the requirement is perhaps--I don't know this; again, I am having to speculate because they won't share the language with me or with anyone else--we will not process any more asylum applications once we have more than 5,000 migrant encounters per day. Let's suppose that that is what it says. If that is what it says--and that is a change compared to existing law--that would seem, perhaps, a change in the assumption--not just the assumption but the reality--that this is a permissive grant of authority. And once you say, ``You may shut that down only after you have reached that level,'' then, at that point, you have changed the ``may-shall'' nature of asylum, and the government is not required to stop processing them, if that is how it is written, until we achieve that ``5,000 migrant encounter per day'' number. By the way, that is a lot of people. That is a lot of people. A lot of people live in communities that are a fraction of that size, cities or towns that are smaller than that. And when you multiply 5,000 people by 365 days, it comes up to 1.825 million people a year. That is a lot of people. Is this just resetting the norm, saying that, until that point, it is not really a problem? I don't know because I can't see the text, but it certainly could mean that. And, by the way, even once this authority kicks in--this authority to supposedly shut down the border in whatever capacity, whether through asylum, parole, or whatever other means they throw in there--they limit the number of days in which that can remain in effect. I believe the authority, as it was explained to me, would apply for up to 14 consecutive days. And what, then they have to reopen it, regardless of whether the number of migrant encounters has dipped meaningfully? I don't know. But it gets even worse than that. They set a maximum number of days in every year that the border can remain shut down, under whatever weird instruction they have adopted. Initially, I am told, it is 275 days per year. That is at the end. At that point, let's suppose you have made it through 275 days total in a particular year of the border being ``shut down,'' not being able to process more asylum applications or parole, or exercise parole authority or whatever it is. But on the 276th day, all the way through the end of day 365, it is immigration Mardi Gras. It is a carnival ride. It is everybody onboard the fun train; this is going to be great. And the cartels are going to make even more money. And they say: Well, the cartels won't put up with that. Nonsense, the cartels are sophisticated enterprises that make tens of billions of dollars a year just on Joe Biden alone. You are telling me they are not going to counter around this thing to make even more money? I have a bridge to sell you if you think they are not. It gets even worse than that. You see, 275 days per year is only the limit in year one. From there, it ratchets down. By the second or third year, it ratchets down to a maximum of 180 days a year that the border can be deemed shut down under this new authority. Why in the Sam Hill would we agree to that? Why would we do that? Why would you want to limit to less than half of the total number of days in a year, regardless of what is happening along the southern border, the time in which that border authority can be deemed shut down? I don't understand it. And it gets even worse than that. With regard to parole authority, the number ``180`` appears, apparently, in this legislation not once but twice--once in the one that I just mentioned, a maximum of 180 days that the border can be shut down under this new authority that, apparently, allows them to stop processing asylum applications, which they already have the power to do, but it appears a second time. You see, currently, there is a 180-day wait between the time an asylum application is processed and then given a plane ticket to the destination of their choice in the United States. On the plane, they can board without providing any documentation of their identity--not even a driver's license from their home country. They just get onboard. There is a 180-day wait from the time that they board that plane until the moment they receive their work permit, which they really shouldn't have because we shouldn't be processing them and letting them in unless or until such time as they have been deemed eligible for asylum and granted asylum--but whatever. They are at least given this 180-day mandatory wait period under current practice. They get rid of that in this proposal--no 180-day wait. You show up, and, as long as you are not in one of those 180 days of the year when it is going to be shut down, we will get you processed, and we will send you away from that detention facility, before you board the plane, with your work permit already in hand. This is nuts--absolutely nuts. Now, look, I have great respect for my colleagues who are trying in good faith to work through this. I love my colleague, the senior Senator from Oklahoma, Senator Lankford. He is one of my favorite people, not just in the Senate but one of my favorite people, period. I know he is doing the best job he can, and he is working under strict orders, not of his own choosing. I have deep respect for him, and that remains despite any differences we may end up having on how we vote on this legislation. Nonetheless, I don't understand. I don't understand, in part, because they haven't been willing to share the text with me when I ask why we can't see the text. It is typically something we do because we make laws here. That is our job. We make laws. Laws consist of words. Words have meaning. We need to see the words well in advance of the time when we plan to pass them. But when I have asked for legislative text on this one, I am told: Well, it is not all in one place. It is in lots of different documents. Well, that is fine. Look, for many years, as a lawyer, I was constantly dealing with documents that we were putting together that contained input for many, many lawyers. And I had to deal with 5, 10, 15 different documents at one time and try to synthesize them all. I can handle that. Everyone here can. Those who have practiced law or engaged in some other occupation have had training that allows us to read and understand things. And we have smart people who work for us who can help us put it all together. But, no, we still can't see it. So, anyway, my point is, I have great respect for Senator Lankford, and I absolutely love the guy. But I have deep concerns with what little I know about this, and this is all I have to go on. I hope he can understand my frustration with the process that tells me I can't see it, even though I know darn well the day is going to come when, if they get a deal, we may not have much time to review this thing--it happens from time to time--when the law firm of Schumer, McConnell, Johnson, and Jeffries, as it is currently comprised, spits out legislation, and we are given hours, or maybe a couple of days, to read it. That is not cool. It happens all the time with spending legislation. It shouldn't. It is a barbaric practice. It is exactly why we are $34 trillion in debt. It should never happen when we are dealing with something as fundamental to our safety and security as this legislation. To put it in context, the last time we undertook a major border security or immigration law overhaul, about a decade ago, we had that pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee in markup for an entire month. A Judiciary Committee markup usually takes an hour or 2, sometimes 3 or 4, for a really long one. This one took a month because this stuff is really complicated. And so it is staggering to me that they would even consider rushing this through if and when they have a deal. Other things that concern me within what little we know about the legislation: I am told that there will be 50,000 additional new immigrant visas granted in this provision and then an additional number of people--some have estimated in the tens of thousands and others have estimated in the hundreds of thousands--of work permits that will be issued, attached to other nonpermanent visa holders who are members of the nonpermanent visa holders' family, who are adults but not authorized to work. This would allow them to work. Some may have concerns with that. I remember, over the years, one of the many things that I have tried to fix in the immigration system. It has long been my belief that you can fix our immigration code best if you target each particular issue as narrowly as possible and don't load everything up all in one bill or else the thing is going to fail. I have tried for many years to end a discriminatory provision in our immigration laws that is strongly biased against people born in heavily populated countries, like India, for example. If you have two immigrants who were eligible for an immigrant visa, whether work-based or otherwise--but, for the work-based immigrant visas, you have two people equally eligible for a visa. One was born in Luxembourg and the other in India. The person born in Luxembourg, just by virtue of the fact that that immigrant came from a small country, with a small population, might have that visa application processed and be in the United States in under a year. The person from India might be on a waiting list for 80 years simply because of this discriminatory feature put in place, most likely for racist reasons many decades ago, to keep certain people that perhaps race-minded lawmakers--the racist lawmakers at the time--might have considered undesirable. I have been trying to fix that for a long time. We finally passed something out of the Senate a couple of years ago that fixed this. It was a miracle. It took forever to get this done. I have been working on it for about a decade. It should have been a real layup to pass in the House because there were 350 cosponsors of the same legislation in the House, and they couldn't and wouldn't get it done. Anyway, I bring all that up to say that we moved Heaven and Earth to get that fixed without adding a single new visa--not a single new visa--to the visas allocated under existing law. Why? Because a lot of people were opposed to that. I was falsely accused at the time by people who misinterpreted it as granting all kinds of new visas. It didn't grant a single visa because we knew that would be very controversial. But to add 50,000 immigrant visas and perhaps tens to hundreds of thousands of additional work permits on top of that is not going to be noncontroversial. You add to all of that the fundamental fact that Joe Biden could end this border security crisis right now. He could do it. First, stop taking down the barrier in Texas. You are embarrassing yourself, and you are endangering our country. Don't do that. You know better. Shame on you, sir. Secondly, after he does that, he could and he should restore the migrant protection protocol, the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. This was in place the day Joe Biden was sworn into office back in January of 2021. It was doing great. President Trump handed over the cleanest border we have had in many decades to Joe Biden, and he messed it all up with the stroke of a pen. He backed out of the ``Remain in Mexico'' program. He canceled it. He was later ordered to reinstate it after lengthy litigation concluded that he acted unlawfully in getting rid of it. He continued to drag his feet. To this day, he hasn't done it. He could do it. He won't, but he should. I ask him to reconsider today. The fact that he is not doing this indicates that he and those who stand with him in this body are not acting in good faith. They are not negotiating in good faith. They cannot--must not--be deemed to be good- faith negotiators on this issue. Why? Because he refuses to enforce the laws that he has. If for the sake of tightening some language here or there in yet-to- be-seen, yet-to-be-understood ways--in ways some have described as ambiguous and uncertain--if that is the primary thing we are getting, is the tightening of the asylum standard, but we might also be limiting the ability of the current or a future President to halt the abuse of asylum and parole, then we can't do this. We shouldn't be doing this at all. It sends the wrong message. Look, the bottom line is this: I think we are back to the point where maybe we ought to just try to pass these separately. If you can get Ukraine supplemental aid passed, fine. Go at it. If you can somehow come up with a deal that actually closes the border security gaps and actually forces the President's hand and places some accountability on him, then I will consider that, too. I may even vote for it if it does the job, notwithstanding the fact I have concerns about sending another $62 billion to a country where we have already spent $113 billion--$900 per U.S. taxpayer. But I would consider it if it actually fixed the problem. I think there are ways to do it. One good way to start as a starting point is to take border security language already passed by the House of Representatives. I know people have said: Well, that can't pass here. Well, we don't know that because we never tried attaching that to other legislation, like the Ukraine-Israel supplemental aid package. Then add to that border security measures that would tie the expenditure of this $62 billion that is supposed to go to Ukraine--tie the release of that in phased packages over the next year--or whatever the increment is--to the achievement of certain border security metrics, goals. They can bring that down to what they themselves have said is tolerable. I believe the Border Patrol has said they maxed out when they get about 500 daily migrant encounters. If we could reduce it down to that and the administration starts enforcing the law and actually starts refusing to let people in after they can no longer process them and reinstates the migrate protection protocols--the ``Remain in Mexico'' program--that will help bring this down to less than 500 migrant encounters per day. If you phased the release of the Ukraine funding under the legislation that way, then Members of both parties could have some assurance that this might make a difference. But, alas, there is no provision in this, no provision being negotiated. It is stunning to me that there isn't. There should be. The reason I say that is because we have had countless conversations within the Senate Republican conference where Member after Member after Member will propose something like that. My friend and colleague, the senior Senator from North Dakota, John Hoeven, is one of the first to raise the idea and has been among the most impassioned advocates for it, saying: Let's tie the Ukraine funding to the achievement of certain border security metrics and other border security measures we might add to it. That will give everybody the confidence that we need that this will make an actual difference. I believe he was the first one to suggest it. He has probably made that argument as often as or more often than any other Member of the conference, but he is not alone. I think I have heard dozens of Republican Senators say something similar. It is true. I have heard maybe one or two--three at the most--Republican Senators express reservations with that, but many multiples of that speak out, saying: Yes, this would be a good thing. Yes, this could bring a lot of us on board. Yet, regrettably, my friend from Oklahoma was instructed not to even seek that. Why? Why do that? If we can't even tie the expenditure of the Ukraine funds, which we know the administration cares about dearly for reasons I cannot comprehend. He cares so much more about Ukraine's border security than ours. I understand his desire to stop Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. I wish he would recognize, by the way, the things we could do with energy policy that might help in that direction. If the United States had been exporting this whole time large quantities of LNG, maybe that would help, because Russia is funding this war and so many other things through its hegemony of the European energy market. There are all sorts of things we could do to help him. He remains concerned about this and wants to spend more and more money on military aid to Ukraine. But if he really cares as much as he does about Ukraine and he wants to get that funding done, I strongly advise him to consider an option like what I just described. Let us tie the release of the Ukraine funding. Let it be rolled out in staggered phases as the Biden administration achieves certain border security metrics and restores confidence--the confidence not just of Members of the Senate and the House but of the American people. I think that might work. If something like that gets packaged right and contains the right reforms, it might even get my vote. I am not somebody who is eager to vote for that, but I really want to secure the border because America is a less safe place every day Joe Biden continues to enrich drug cartels and subject women and children to sex slavery and indentured servitude. We have a duty here to make sure we pass good laws and to make sure those laws are enforced as they are supposed to be. When they don't enforce them, we shouldn't reward them by funding every pet project that the incumbent administration deems important. Sometimes we need to insist that they do their jobs. If we reward bad behavior, we are going to get more bad things, and it will be dangerous for the American people. I believe in this country. I believe in the American dream. That dream is becoming more distant every day lawlessness prevails. We can restore it. We can recapture it. But we do have to insist that our border be secure. It is not. May we make it secure once again is my entire endeavor in giving these remarks tonight. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, America's students are failing. Reading and math scores are at historic lows nationwide. In places like Baltimore, 40 percent of high schools don't even have a single math-proficient student--not a single one. Forty percent of the schools in Baltimore can't find a single math-proficient student. This must be a wake-up call because those school districts aren't alone. There are others that are failing. And yes, there is a wide array of performance outcomes in school districts across the country, but this kind of trend is being seen more and more seemingly every day. So it has to be a wake-up call, and it is proof that our education system has lost its way. It has betrayed its charge and lost our trust. Now, to be clear--to be perfectly clear--our students' failures are not of their own making. Those failures are the unintended yet undeniable consequences and the students the innocent victims of a one- size-fits-all education system that has ventured into the business of ideological conformity, forsaking our children's literacy for the pursuit of social engineering. American classrooms have become arenas where history is rewritten, and parents--the rightful stewards of their children's futures--are marginalized or in some instances labeled as ``domestic terrorists'' just for questioning this new order. It comes as no surprise that parents are seeking alternative ways to educate their children. In fact, the Washington Post found that since 2018, homeschooling has increased by 51 percent while public school enrollment is decreasing year after year. So these parents are making a different decision. Who can blame them? Who can blame parents for wanting to shield their children from inappropriate school materials--inappropriate school materials that parents, understandably, are outraged upon discovering that these things are being shared with their students. Sometimes they are sufficiently upset about it that they will show up to a school board meeting. And sometimes within that school board meeting they will just read the materials that are being given to their children in a public school and then be told that they have to stop; that they have to stop reading it because it is too inappropriate. It is making too many people uncomfortable. Well, if it is inappropriate to be read at a school board meeting because it makes the school board or spectators uncomfortable, then it is inappropriate to be taught in the schools. In any event, it is the parents' decision as to whether it is inappropriate. And a parent who decides that their child is being subjected to this kind of material ought to have the opportunity, without excessive difficulty created by the government, to choose a different educational option for the parents' children. Who can blame parents for taking education into their own hands when year after year they are not seeing improvement in their children's learning? Parents, you see, and not school boards and certainly not unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats are the fundamental drivers of their children's education. This is the way it always should be. Now, I introduced a bill, a bill that I call the ACE Act. It is an acronym that stands for Achieving Choice in Education. I introduced the ACE Act because I believe that parents, endowed with innate and instinctive wisdom and an unbreakable bond with their children, are the rightful navigators of their children's educational journey. The ACE Act would deliver on this belief by fortifying the rule of section 529 education savings accounts as vital tools for parents. Traditionally focused on college expenses, the ACE Act expands these boundaries to include homeschooling and a broader array of private school expenses, allowing families with students in public, private, religious, and at- home schools to spend their hard-earned money on materials, books, online resources, and therapies for students with disabilities. Moreover, the ACE Act enriches these accounts by enhancing Federal tax exemptions for distributions, effectively doubling the annual distribution cap from $10,000 to $20,000 and introducing tax-exempt gifting provisions. These changes ensure that families can allocate more of their hard-earned money or even a generous gift toward their children's educational journeys and to do so without the unnecessary strain of an excessive tax burden to go along with it. You have to remember that these are things parents are concerned about when they decide they need to do something different for their child's education, including these inappropriate materials to which they are being exposed in many instances. These are paid for by money that already came from the parents. It is built into their tax bill. They pay it. They are already paying for it. So they shouldn't be told again and again that they have no choice in it--that it is not their choice--and then be penalized with no recourse at all within the tax system when they decide a different educational approach is appropriate and necessary for their child. This ought to be their choice, and governments ought to do as little as possible to interfere with that. Governments shouldn't be punishing parents for making that choice. So the ACE Act would encourage States to embrace more school choice policies and laws. Under the ACE Act, if States don't have qualifying school choice laws already enacted, they would lose the Federal income tax exemption on municipal bonds. This would encourage States to do the right thing, encourage more States to do what many States already have wisely done, which is to give parents more choice in public education. The guardians of our future are not, in fact, distant bureaucrats but rather the parents and families who live, breathe, and dream of a better tomorrow for their children. The ACE Act provides a rallying call to embrace school choice, to honor individual freedom, and to give the most responsibility to the ones who have the most at stake in it, which is families, to be driven primarily by parents. The lamentable state of our education system is a stark indication that America's educational status quo has faltered. To correct course, we have got to trust parents to discern what is best for their children. They know what is best for the children, better than any government bureaucracy ever could or ever will. They care infinitely for their children. Their love for them knows no boundaries. We need to respect that and understand that parents are very much inclined and incentivized in so many ways that the government never could be to look out for the best educational interests of their children, to plot a brighter course for them, one that would inure to their benefit and not to their detriment. So as they continue to be taxed by the State and then told by the State that they have got to send their child only to a particular institution, they need alternatives. Some of those alternatives we could make less burdensome, less onerous, and less punitive to the extent they are chosen by the parents. By championing the principles of choice and freedom in education and ensuring that government doesn't stand in the way of this endeavor, we can foster an environment in which America's students can thrive, powered by an education system that truly serves them. Opponents of efforts like these will sometimes build a rallying cry-- a rallying cry--that talks about the importance of the public education system. Yes, the public education system is important, and this is part of it. This is not distinct from the public education system. School choice options are part of the public education system because when you take money from someone through the tax system with the understanding that you will educate their children with it, you owe it to them to give them options and to not pigeonhole them into one school, one approach, dictated in many instances by a teachers union that may or may not have the best interests of their children at heart. Sometimes this is an issue, sometimes it is not. For many parents, they are happy with their existing public school options, but more often than not it is not options, it is an option. It is just take it or leave it. Some parents can afford just fine making a different choice, but they need to be given more options that are less punitive because it is, after all, up to the parents to make sure that their children are educated, that they are treated well, are cared for well, and that they are not being fed things that the parents find abhorrent. That is why this is about so much more than just the education system. This is about freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom within a family for parents to look out for the best interests of their children without having the State or the Federal Government unreasonably, unfairly intruding on them. It is time to foster more school choice options, and it is time to pass the ACE Act. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I come to the floor to talk about the fitness for office of Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. My remarks are not directed at Mr. Mayorkas's character--I don't know him other than in the context of the Secretary of Homeland Security--nor do I direct my comments toward any other aspect of his life: his status as a husband, father, brother, son, neighbor, or anything else. But in this context, we have to evaluate the job that he is doing, and Secretary Mayorkas does not have the confidence of the U.S. Senate or those we represent to continue to defend our border integrity and protect our country. It is the very job he is called to do. We have to remember that we have three branches within our Federal Government: one that makes the law; one that enforces the laws, or is supposed to; and a third that interprets them where people disagree as to the law's meaning. His role is narrowly focused on interpreting a narrow category of laws, including and especially those designed to protect our border security. He has simply refused to enforce the laws he is charged with administering. Under his watch, we have had at least 8 million people come into this country illegally. Over 8 million unauthorized individuals are among those who we know came in unlawfully, and the numbers keep going up. We have been breaking all kinds of records--the exact wrong records to break. We broke a record just last month when we had 302,000 encounters with illegal immigrants just in December alone. Those are just the ones whom we saw, whom we are aware of. That is the highest number we have ever seen in recorded history. Under the watch of Secretary Mayorkas, this administration has incentivized parents--parents across the globe--to send their young children, their young sons and their young daughters, on a dangerous journey to the United States, where they end up in the hands of traffickers, where many of them end up as indentured servants and many of them subjected to the sex trade. A substantial portion of them--a majority of them, according to some estimates--are subjected to sexual abuse, to rape and other atrocities. More than 430,000 unaccompanied children have come into the United States illegally under his watch. Now, in the meantime, he has tried to paper over those, to make lawful entries out of those who have entered unlawfully. He has created 13 separate illegal parole programs designed to increase the flow into the country by the hundreds of thousands, trying to make illegal immigration look legal when it is not, using this parole authority-- parole authority that is there for a specific purpose. It is there to serve a humanitarian or a public-need purpose, and it has always been understood to be something that is there only on a case-by-case basis, not categorical. In other words, if we are aware of somebody with a humanitarian purpose--somebody's grandmother has died and they need to attend the funeral in the United States--they may come in for a short period of time and then leave. If they need a certain type of medical treatment that is available only here, they can be paroled in for a short period of time, and then they are expected to leave. The public purpose is also individualized. Somebody speaks an obscure language. Somebody is on trial, and we need an interpreter who can't be found inside this country. We bring someone in for a short period of time, and then they leave. It is always on an individualized basis and always on a temporary basis. He has run afoul of those by creating at least 13 of these illegal parole programs. So with these kinds of numbers, how on Earth can he claim to have the border under operational control? He can't. He can't. Yet, somehow, he does so. To do so, he has to accept this made-up definition of ``operational control''--a definition without any connection to actual statutory or operational requirements. On his watch, CBP has decreased its vetting procedures--those designed specifically to deal with people coming from China, including military-age Chinese males, who are crossing our southern border in unprecedented, alarming numbers. Under his watch, we have seen a dramatic increase in known terrorists who have entered through our southern border. Mr. President, 279, in fact, have been caught at our southern border since Biden took office. Now, by election day of 2024, we will have seen at least 10 million illegal immigrants that will have crossed over our southern border. Under his watch, the amount of deadly fentanyl coming into this country has increased--increased dramatically. In fact, a report out in October of 2023, just a couple of months ago, indicates that there were 6 billion--with a ``b''--6 billion lethal doses of fentanyl that entered our borders across our southern boundary. That means that you could kill three-fourths of the entire population of the world; you could kill every American 54 times with that. This is poisoning. This is a weaponized tool that could kill Americans and is killing Americans in droves. This is not free. This is not a victimless crime. There are victims littered all over the Western Hemisphere, all over the world, but especially here in America. Under his watch, the administration willfully ended the carefully negotiated and very effective ``Remain in Mexico'' program put in place by the previous administration, which required those seeking asylum, crossing on land through our southern border, to wait in Mexico, to await final disposition of their asylum claims during the adjudication of those claims here in the United States. They just ended it, then they litigated it, then they were told by a court to reinstitute it, and then they have been drawing that out in a rope-a-dope fashion. Under his watch, the administration has decreased willfully its ability to detain those required by statute to be detained even though illegal entries have increased dramatically. A recent CBS poll found that 75 percent of Americans say that the situation across the southern border is a crisis or at least very serious. The House Judiciary Committee report stated that between January 20, 2021--the day Biden took office--and March 31 of last year, the Biden administration removed from the United States only 5,993 illegal aliens who were placed in removal proceedings before an immigration judge during that time. In other words, let's think about what this means. Of the at least 2.1 million aliens released into the United States since January 20, 2021, the Biden administration has failed to remove through immigration court removal proceedings 99.7 percent of those illegal aliens. It is a new day. It is 2024. Secretary Mayorkas, just as he has had all along, still has the legal authority to enforce the border, but he still refuses to do so. The crisis at our southern border, make no mistake, is not the consequence of inadequate statutory text. It is not for want of legislative authority. He has that authority, just as the previous President did, but, unlike the previous administration, this administration refuses willfully to enforce it. I find it ironic and counterproductive that the U.S. Senate continues to negotiate with Secretary Mayorkas on border security issues even as he refuses--as he has done from the very beginning--to enforce the border, creating this humanitarian crisis and even as he is facing, as a result of that, impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives even as we speak. We found him not to be capable of negotiating in good faith on this. Why? Because he refuses to enforce existing law which, if he did enforce it, would bring this crisis to an end abruptly. The crisis at our southern border--and it is a crisis--is unacceptable. Americans are demanding accountability. We must fire Secretary Mayorkas.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, I would like to begin my remarks by focusing on what we are debating and what we are not debating. We really need clarity on this point of order and what it is about. To be perfectly clear, what this point of order would do would simply be to remove from the National Defense Authorization Act a nongermane reauthorization of a surveillance authority--section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act--that has a well-documented history of abuse. Including the reauthorization in the NDAA, of course, violates rule XXVIII of the Senate rules governing conference reports. This particular provision was airdropped into the National Defense Authorization Act, notwithstanding the absence of any predicate for that provision either in the House version or the Senate version of the bill, which, of course, the conference committee was created to iron out. It was created to iron out the differences between those two bills. Because it was in neither version, the Senate Parliamentarian correctly concluded that this is a nongermane addition to the measure, and as such, it is subject to a rule XXVIII point of order. What this means as a practical matter today is this comes out; it comes out unless 60 Senators make a deliberate, conscious choice and make that choice by voting to waive rule XXVIII. They would be saying: Yeah, it is not germane. Yeah, it wasn't in the House version or the Senate version. Notwithstanding that, we want it in there anyway. For the reasons that I will articulate now, that would be a grave mistake--a grave mistake on multiple levels. As I make that explanation, I do want to clarify at the very outset what I am not asking for, what is not my objective here. My objective is not to cede our ability to collect the substance of communications from our foreign adversaries under section 702 of FISA. That is not it. I am not trying to make the whole program go dark. What I am talking about is the fact that we need much needed reform in this area because section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been widely, infamously, severely abused over a long period of time, to the point that, literally, hundreds of thousands of American citizens have become victims of what I refer to as warrantless backdoor searches. What does this mean? OK. So the way it works under FISA 702: FISA 702 allows our intelligence-gathering Agencies to go out and scoop up information--bits of information, recordings, phone calls, records of things like texts and email exchanges, and other types of electronic communications--and store them in a database. Insofar as those are directed, as section 702 orders are supposed to be under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, at foreign nationals operating on foreign soil, we are not concerned about them. The Fourth Amendment is not there to protect them. It is not there to protect our foreign adversaries operating on foreign soil. No. It is there to protect the American people, the American people against their own government. The Fourth Amendment has been around for a long time. It has been on the books in the United States since 1791 when it was made part of the Constitution. And it provides, in essence, that you are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy in your person, in your papers, in your home; that the government can't just come in and search and seize your papers, your personal effects and communications--not without a warrant, a warrant that has to be based on probable cause, evidence of probable cause of a crime and that describes, with particularity, the things to be searched, the items to be seized, and so forth. While new to this country as a matter of U.S. constitutional law as of 1791, it actually goes back a lot farther than that. These were things that evolved over many centuries under British law--and with good reason. So it was with good reason, it was on that foundation-- centuries of British common law experience--that we adopted the Fourth Amendment into our Constitution. And it matters that we follow it. It matters that we follow it in every circumstance. And every American ought to be concerned about deviations from that, especially whereas here, there is a pattern and practice of abuse, of going after Americans' communications. So how does that happen? In a database that is full of communications collected on and from and pertaining to our foreign adversaries on foreign soil, how do the rights of American citizens end up being threatened by that? Well, here is how it happens: When they collect all of this stuff--on some occasions, foreign nationals communicate with friends, relatives, business associates--I don't know--perhaps intelligence targets, whatever they may be, who are in the United States, who are United States citizens. So some of those conversations--by phone, by text, by email, or whatever electronic means--end up being, as we say, incidentally collected and placed into the 702 database. One of the biggest things we are concerned about here is that on literally hundreds of thousands of occasions, innocent, law-abiding Americans have been subjected to what we call a backdoor, warrantless search whereby someone at the FBI or another Agency enters in information. They know that Bob Smith has a certain phone number or a certain email address or some other identifier; they know that Bob Smith is a U.S. citizen; and they go in and they search for communications in the 702 database pertaining not to a foreign terrorist, not to an agent of a foreign power outside the United States, not to a foreign adversary in any way outside the United States, but to Bob Smith, the law-abiding American citizen. In that circumstance, it is a problem. It is a problem to go into that without a warrant. That stuff is there not just for the government's curiosity. It is there not for some voyeuristic, pleasure-seeking impulse on the part of Federal agents. No. It is there to protect the United States of America from foreign adversaries and to allow us to track our foreign adversaries and what they are doing. And so in order to go into that database, they should have to get a warrant. Now, deep down, folks at the FBI appear not to disagree with that, at least in the sense that they try mightily to convince us that they are already preventing warrantless backdoor searches of American citizens' private communications on that database. In fact, they have been doing this. I have been in the Senate--along with my friend and colleague, the junior Senator from Kentucky, we have both been here for 13 years. The entirety of that time, I have served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The entirety of that time, I have questioned FBI Directors and other people within the government, asking them about what happens with this 702 database, particularly as it relates to private communications that are stored in the 702 database of American citizens and searches involving American citizens. Over and over and over again, for 13 years, like deja vu all over again, I get the same variation of the same set of answers: Don't worry. You have got nothing to worry about. We have really good procedures in the U.S. Government. We follow those procedures. We take them seriously. We are professionals, and we will not mess with your information. Yet again and again and again and again, every single time they make that promise, it is like it is a curse because it gets worse every single time they say it. And every single time, I ask them more questions designed to delve into what they are actually doing, and every single time, including my most recent interaction with the FBI Director, Christopher Wray, just last week, it becomes clear, on closer examination, that they are not really stopping these things from happening. In fact, just last week, Director Wray had the audacity to tell me that, no, this has all stopped now because he adopted some new procedures--like I hadn't heard that one before--when, in fact, some of the examples he pointed to were things that supposedly happened only after he had adopted these procedures and all the bad stuff had stopped after those procedures--it turns out, some of those things had happened after he had adopted those procedures. No surprise to me; no surprise to anyone who has followed this; no surprise to anyone who understands human nature. And those within government exercise power that doesn't belong to them. So we shouldn't be reauthorizing this, not in the NDAA. Not only is it not germane, not only was it not in the House version or in the Senate version, Madam President, it is not even necessary. Why? OK. When you look at the statutory text, the statutory text adopted by the U.S. Congress in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments of 2017, which I think took effect in early 2018, they make abundantly clear that they were written in such a way as to provide for this very circumstance, meaning the circumstance in which we are approaching now, the scheduled expiration of section 702 of FISA at midnight on December 31, on New Year's Eve. So at the stroke of midnight--now New Year's Day--FISA expires. Those who are in favor of waiving this point of order, disregarding the Senate rule XXVIII that should require us to strike this unnecessary, overbroad, and manipulative extension of FISA 702, they would have us believe that Armageddon will immediately be upon us--dogs and cats living together in the streets, the wrath of God, Apocalyptic stuff like we never experienced. Why? Because FISA 702 will have gone dark. The problem with that argument: It is not true. It flies in the face of statutory text adopted by this Congress the last time we reauthorized FISA 702. And that language makes clear that even if FISA 702 expires during that time period, because there was a certification granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISC--and that was issued on or about April 12 of 2023 and those certifications are designed to carry forward 365 days--we have at least until the end of the day on April 11, 2024, before communications could no longer be collected under section 702 because, again, we have the certification that is in place. That certification, together with the language that was passed the last time we extended FISA 702, inadvisably--inadvisably--without any major statutory reforms--but we did include that one--we made that the case. So it is not going to go dark. If Senator Paul's point of order under rule XXVIII succeeds, and if we are able to thwart the effort to waive that--and it would take only 41 of us to do it, only 41 of us would have to stand behind that to prevent them from getting it to 60 to waive it--if that happens, it is still not going to go dark. It wouldn't go dark unless or until we hadn't extended FISA 702 before April 11, 2024. It begs the question: Why in the Sam Hill did we have to put this thing in here if it wasn't necessary? Well, I have a sneaking suspicion I know why some might hope that it happens that way, for the same reason that it is not going to make 702 collection go dark as of 12:01 a.m. on New Year's Day. This measure, the 702 extension buried within the 3,000 or so pages of the National Defense Authorization Act, will give them a bright and golden opportunity to make this not a 4-month extension of FISA 702 but a 16- month extension of section 702. In other words, if you read through the statutory text that we adopted the last time we reauthorized 702 and you wanted this to extend and you wanted to make sure that we delayed and delayed and delayed the period of time in which Congress would be forced to make a decision--a decision could result in serious reforms to FISA 702--what would you do? Well, you would pass this very thing. You would waive Senator Paul's point of order under rule XXVIII. And then you would probably wait until April, I don't know, 10 or 11 of 2024. You would go back to the FISC--the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court--and you would ask for a new certification. A certification that would do what? Move it forward another 365 days. We would now be punting until April 2025, well after the 2024 election cycle had run to its end before having to address this. That is what we are dealing with. Now, let's back up a minute. Let's say that there are some within the sound of my voice who might disagree with my interpretation of the statutory text we adopted the last time we renewed section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They would be wrong because the text is really clear, but let's just assume that for a minute. Let's accept that premise for purposes of argument here. Even if that is the case, we can still strip out this poorly written measure and replace it with another freestanding measure, not adopt it as part of the NDAA-- one that I prepared, one that I am introducing, along with my lead Democratic cosponsor, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden--that would reauthorize section 702 until mid-March. It would reauthorize it with instructions that say: If during that time period the FISC issues a new certification, that certification may not be read to authorize further collection under 702 if during that time period FISA 702 were to expire. This makes a huge difference because if we do it this way, rather than through the National Defense Authorization Act, as Senator Wyden and I have proposed doing, then we will actually have a force-moving event. We will actually have a real opportunity for the House and for the Senate to have an open, honest, robust, roiling debate about the nature and extent of the abuse that we have seen under FISA 702. And we will be in a great position at that point to adopt real reforms--real reforms that would require you to get a warrant. If you want to collect information specifically on Americans in this FISA 702 database, you need to get a warrant. You just do. The government may not like it because governments never like anything that makes it more difficult to do what they want to do, but our law enforcement Agencies do it all the time. They do it because they have to because it is the law, and it is the Constitution. We don't deviate from that. It is bad. Somehow these intelligence gathering agencies and the FBI think that they are exempt when it comes to FISA 702. They are not. They should not be. No American should be comfortable with that. Recent experience and long-term experience have both taught us that there is a grave risk in doing that, in simply ignoring it, in simply presuming that the human beings that operate in this environment will always have their best interest at heart. And yet, they want to push ahead with this measure, saying that the sky will fall. It will not. I am absolutely convinced, if we succeed tonight--if Senator Paul's point of order succeeds and it is not waived--I am confident that within 24 hours, we can and we will adopt this freestanding measure to make sure that 702 doesn't go dark. Even though it wouldn't go dark otherwise, even though we won't need it, we are willing to do that. We are just wanting to clarify one thing, which is that we still have to have this debate. We still have to have a force-moving event in the next few months that works out the case, that reforms the system, that requires the government to get a warrant if they are going after an American. It is not too much to ask, not at all. We have proposals that are ready to do that. I have a bill that I introduced with Senator Wyden, the Government Surveillance Reform Act. There is a counterpart to that in the House of Representatives. It passed out of the markup in the House Judiciary Committee just last week. It contains these and other reforms, reforms about having to get a warrant, reforms that would impose some consequence to those government agents who abuse the system. And lest you think, even for a moment, that these abuses are contrived, fictitious, or a figment of our imagination--some sort of paranoid fantasy hallucination--they are not. We need to support this point of order. We need to not waive it. Waiving it is lawless. Waiving this particular point of order would contribute to more circumvention of the Fourth Amendment. In the spirit of English parliamentarian John Wilkes, whose rights under English law and the English Constitution were violated just before Easter in 1763, he stood up to the government. He stood up to the government. He stood up to the government of King George III, and he said: No, you are not doing this. He sued the officers who had carried out what was, in effect, a warrantless search of his home under the use of a general warrant. In some ways, it looks a little like a 702 collection of a citizen. In other ways, it is different because they didn't have the technology that we have got now, but the same principle applied. He sued the King and his Ministers, and he won a large money judgment. He got all this as a result--and he was searched as a result and he was jailed in the Tower of London for a time as a result of his publication of a document known as North Britain No. 45. North Britain No. 45 criticized King George III and his Ministers for, among other things, using general warrants, warrants that basically said go out and find people who did bad stuff, search them, seize their papers, their possessions, them, if necessary, and make it happen--no particularity requirement, no probable cause. Just go do it. No. 45--a reflection of North Britain No. 45--quickly became synonymous on both sides of the Atlantic with the cause of liberty and with John Wilkes himself and with the cause against warrantless searches and seizures and the use of general warrants, which might as well be warrantless searches and seizures. John Wilkes would be appalled by what he sees today. And the American people, just as they heralded him, an ocean away, in the 1760s and 1770s, after this happened, just as he was celebrated all over England by remembering him by the No. 45, they were celebrating him then too. So, too, today the American people will be pleased because they will have reason to celebrate that they are no longer subject to these warrantless searches because they are wrong. Once again, lest you be convinced, even for a moment, that this is hyped up, it is not. Now, look, if you are comfortable with the government, under the pretext of looking for foreign surveillance and without any kind of warrant, let alone evidence establishing probable cause, let alone something that would satisfy the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment--if you are comfortable with the government violating civil liberties of the American people this way, if you are comfortable with them violating the liberties of at least one sitting Member of the U.S. Senate--could be any of us--violating the civil liberties of at least one sitting Member of the House of Representatives--could be any of them, not sure who it was--with them violating the civil liberties of protesters, both conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, with them violating the civil liberties of 19,000 law-abiding innocent Americans whose only common thread was the fact that they all happened to have donated to a particular political campaign, if you are OK with these and hundreds of thousands of other egregious violations of the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment, then, by all means, you should feel free to go ahead--go ahead--and support the motion to waive. But if you are not OK with any of those things and don't think anyone is immune from them--if you are not OK with any of these things--it is illogical, it is irrational, it is insane to do anything other than to oppose the motion to waive the point of order. So I will close by asking the question: Why would they want to do this? Those who are so dug in and making this even harder for the NDAA to pass in the House--you know, because of the fact that they airdropped this thing into the NDAA at the last minute sparked such a controversy over there that they are having to bring it up under a procedure known as suspension of the rules. Suspension of the rules requires them to pass it with 290 votes instead of 218. It would make it infinitely easier for this thing to get passed and passed quickly over there if we just listen to Senator Paul, if we just sustain rather than waiving, foolishly, the point of order that he is making under rule XXVIII. They are wanting to avoid not only changing 702 and making the Federal Government answer to the people according to the U.S. Constitution, they are unwilling even to face the music of this debate--a debate that is long overdue, a debate that we should have had and that should have culminated in reforms through legislation in 2018 but did not. And shame on all of us for not making that happen. Some of us tried. We were overcome. But the American people are not going to take this anymore, nor should they. So if you are not comfortable with those kind of abuses--and I think we should all be uncomfortable--with this sacrifice of liberty on the altar of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and dogged secrecy, then support Senator Paul--support him in his meritorious point of order and oppose the motion to waive that point of order. The American people expect more, and the Constitution demands it.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, in the words of a Simon and Garfunkel song, they sing of a dream in which ``the world had all agreed to put an end to war.'' And they reached this agreement, apparently, just by signing a single piece of paper. This dream is just a dream, of course. That is not how things are brought about. That is not how lasting peace occurs. But the dream echoes the stated aspirations that led to the creation and, eventually, the perpetuation of the United Nations. But as history unfolded, the stark reality has not lived up to those lofty aspirations. We have witnessed failure upon failure, and yet the 20th-century notion of a collective world peace still lingers in the minds of the American foreign policy establishment. It is a notion that believes that, somehow, U.S. participation and leadership within the United Nations is a foundational pillar of our security and our strength. A glance at the world today, however, reveals the harsh truth: Enduring global peace remains just a dream. While the corridors of the United Nations were designed for diplomacy, it now serves as a place where America's adversaries--people who trample on diplomatic principles and even human dignity itself, to say nothing of national sovereignty--sponsor initiatives that fly in the face of our foundational principles and values. Just last November, we saw Iran, known for its support of terrorist groups and its systemic targeting of Jewish people, chairing a U.N. human rights event--actually chairing it. Russia and China, nations that challenge our interests and undermine our values at every turn, hold permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council. China, for its part, also continues to enjoy the benefits of developing nation status, exploiting U.N. programs and other monetary benefits for questionable gain. Now, the United States, as the U.N.'s largest funder, ends up tacitly supporting these things through its funding. The largest contributor to the U.N.'s budget is the United States. The Biden administration continues to fund, indirectly, groups like Hamas through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known for its anti-Semitic indoctrination. Similarly, the previous administration halted funding for the United Nations Population Fund due to its support for coercive abortion practices in China. The bloated bureaucracy of the U.N. epitomizes the very foreign entanglements that our Founding Fathers warned against. The global security environment of today underscores the urgency of reasserting American sovereignty. The DEFUND Act, which I have introduced this week in the Senate, seeks to end U.S. participation in the United Nations system, ensuring that any future attempts to rejoin would require Senate approval. Now, detractors argue that U.S. involvement is essential for our security and that absence from the U.N. would somehow diminish our soft power, forcing us to rely solely on military might. These are misleading distractions. The current U.N. system itself erodes American soft power and compels us to conform our national interest to the whims of the so-called rules-based international order. This fearmongering overlooks the proven value of bilateral relationships, which are the true bedrock of international diplomacy. At the U.N.'s inception in 1945, President Truman presented a choice between ``international chaos'' and the ``establishment of a world organization for . . . peace.'' Yet, despite the U.N.'s existence, chaos abounds, adversaries leverage their U.N. positions, and the goal of peace is overshadowed by the ambition for supranational governance. The true hope for a peaceful world lies not in such global institutions but in the strength of our national sovereignty and the use of that strength to forge and continue to foster bilateral relationships around the world. As William Shakespeare said, ``What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?'' One must truly ask: What does the United Nations seek? Is it truly peace? I think not. Its actions speak for themselves. Since 1945, the United States has slowly surrendered national sovereignty to the U.N. under the guise of customary international law and under this broad aspirational goal of somehow bringing peace and harmony through this international organization, an international organization that is, itself, utterly untethered from the electoral politics of any country. They very much operate as an island unto themselves once they enter the halls of the U.N. Now, we in the United States finance a very significant portion of the U.N., much of it voluntarily, with no obligation to do so. Our generosity has been misused to empower terrorists; foment hate; facilitate coercive practices abroad; and in many, many ways, undermine our values. The DEFUND Act aims to restore American independence from the U.N.'s bureaucracy. It will repeal the foundational Participation Act within the U.N., the U.N. Participation Act of 1945; terminate our contributions and participation in peacekeeping operations; and strip U.N. personnel of diplomatic immunity within the United States. It will also remove the United States from the World Health Organization and prohibit reentry into the U.N. system without the Senate's advice and consent. It is time that we face reality. The U.N. has long since ceased to be an effective or responsible steward of our resources. It is time for America to lead through strength and sovereignty, not through subservience to an organization that no longer serves our interests-- much less the interests of a realizable, lasting peace.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I want to note, at the outset, that we are not asked to vote in this Chamber on polling questions. We vote on legislation. While people, when responding to a poll, may respond overwhelmingly in response to certain questions, it doesn't mean that, when they come to understand fully what the law at issue would actually do, they wouldn't feel differently. The truth is that the legislation that we are being asked to pass by unanimous consent today, without additional debate, discussion, opportunity for amendment, opportunity for input by the public--that is the bill S. 494, the Background Check Expansion Act--has some real problems with it, problems that I think make it a bill that stands to transform, in some circumstances, ordinary law-abiding citizens into criminals. We always have to consider this when evaluating any law, particularly any law with criminal implications, particularly any law with criminal implications that touches on a constitutionally protected right enumerated in a constitutional amendment. This is not solely about transactions involving guns at gun stores. This is about the father who wishes to pass down a hunting rifle to his son or the friend who wants to lend a shotgun to his neighbor who is in need of protection at the time. Universal background checks, as this bill conceives them, don't just regulate; they criminalize these quintessential moments of American life and, under this legislation, would render unlawful what in countless circumstances would be lawful and even constitutionally protected behavior. Now, most would not think twice about lending a firearm to a family member for sporting or personal protection purposes, and yet this bill threatens to do that by narrowing the definition of family to such an extent that passing a gun to a daughter-in-law or to a great-grandson could lead to criminal charges. This bill fails to distinguish between a criminal act and a gesture of trust and safety. Participating in a hunting trip often involves using firearms. Of course, it is important to be aware that under this proposal, under this bill, if you hand over your firearm to a partner during such a trip, even for a short period of time, you could potentially be held criminally liable if that individual doesn't hold the proper hunting license. It is an absurd overreach that would penalize the innocent traditions that bind our communities together. The only conceivable way to enforce such a law is through the creation of an expansive, Orwellian national gun registry--yes, a national gun registry. Now, it is here that we arrive at the true purpose or, at least, the true inevitable outcome of this legislation were it to become law. Universal background checks only work when you have a national gun registry. This bill would require a registry, even though and notwithstanding the legitimate policy concerns embraced by Congress when Congress prohibited the creation of such a registry in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act. However, the ATF has already compiled a database with over 920 million records, a direct challenge to both the letter and the spirit of the Firearm Owners' Protection Act and Public Law 112-55. Let's not compound the problem created by the ATF's illegal and constitutionally problematic registry by enacting a law that cannot be enforced without the creation of a national gun registry. Registries lead, inevitably, to gun confiscation. If you don't believe me, if you don't want to take my word for it on that, just look to the public statements made by some of my colleagues in the Senate and our counterparts in the House. They told us confiscation is the goal. As our friends at Gun Owners of America have reminded us, without this invasive registry, enforcement of S. 494 is unfeasible. We are staring down the barrel of a system that would monitor the most personal and responsible uses of firearms among citizens. Now, the Senator asked us to pass this major legislation without any debate, without any meaningful opportunity for amendment or further discussion. This isn't how Congress works. This certainly isn't how the U.S. Senate should work, certainly not on a matter so significant and so directly tied to an enumerated constitutional right as this one. This bill should, of course, go through the Senate Judiciary Committee, a body on which I serve and a body where Members routinely can and do debate, offer amendments, and raise these and other policy and constitutional concerns. I also want to speak for a moment to what was referenced as the gun show loophole. It is not, in fact, a loophole. There is no such loophole. The effect of the law is that, if you are a federally licensed firearms dealer, you have to perform these functions before you sell it, with or without you being in the presence of a gun show. If an FFL shows up at a gun show and sells guns, the FFL has to conduct the background check. It isn't a loophole. Moreover, we are talking about a tiny, minuscule percentage of people who even do these things. We are looking at the overwhelming percentage. According to the Department of Justice bureau that collects crime statistics, a tiny percentage of people who even buy them at gun shows go on to commit crimes with them--like less than 1 percent. Very few of them even buy them in any retail establishment, opting instead to buy them on a clandestine market in an illegal way. So, at the end of the day, we have to evaluate this law just like we would any law--but this law in particular, given that it touches on a constitutionally protected, enumerated right. We have to look at both the law's impact on criminal behavior, which is negligible, and on the law's tendency to punish the law-abiding. It is not the law-abiding who typically will go to illegal sources to buy a gun. It is not the law-abiding who refuse to dot the i's and cross the t's. It is typically the law-abiding who are willing to go through that process. We shouldn't be adding more redtape that is going to affect mostly the law-abiding, touching on very few of those actually bent on violent criminal activity. This bill would do precisely that. It would punish the law-abiding citizens for the actions of criminals. It is time to accept this fact, and it is time for us, really, to choose between the various tensions that we feel pulling on us. I am confident that, at the end of the day, we should choose common sense over fear. We should choose liberty over control. We should choose the rights of the law-abiding many over the criminally minded few. On this basis, Mr. President, and for these reasons, I object.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I have nothing but warm feelings, respect, and gratitude for the noble service that my colleagues from Alaska and Iowa and South Carolina and Indiana have demonstrated in their loyalty to their country, serving in their respective branches in the U.S. military, and nothing but respect for the service that they have dedicated to the United States as U.S. Senators. I have nothing but respect for the brave men and women who have for two and a half centuries donned the uniform in defense of their fellow beings so that they might live in comfort and peace, while they offer up their last full measure of devotion, day after day. I have nothing but respect for what they are trying to do in the sense that I know that they want the military to be all that it needs to be in order to protect the American people. I certainly do share the concern that they express. But to the extent we ever put our armed services personnel in jeopardy because of political disputes, that is not ideal. We don't want to ever sacrifice military readiness because of a political battle, and it is because of that, and not in spite of it, that I am here tonight. I want to be clear. The particular strategy deployed here is not mine. It is that of a dear friend and colleague who is here with me tonight. It is not my strategy. It is his. And it is because it is his that I am here to defend him in that, notwithstanding the fact that it is not the particular tactic that I would have chosen. He has chosen a tactic that is legitimate and that he has every right to deploy under the rules of the Senate--rules that go back nearly two and a half centuries in order to protect the individual rights of each Senator. These have deep meaning under our constitutional system. In the U.S. Senate, we operate differently than they do in the House. First of all, we have this role. In the words of the minority leader, we are in the personnel business, in addition to being in the business of passing legislation. Being in the personnel business means that we have got to review people as they come up for Senate confirmation. We are also different in that every State is represented equally. In fact, the only change that you cannot constitutionally make to the Constitution by means of a constitutional amendment is that principle. You cannot amend the Constitution to alter the principle of equal representation among the States. And it is that very principle that is reflected in these Senate rules and always has been. Why? Because it is important to make sure that every State does have full representation-- that one isn't represented more than another. The people of Alabama have elected my friend and colleague, the senior Senator from Alabama, to represent them. That is why they have these rights. That is why they are important to defend. So notwithstanding the fact that any of us might have chosen a different tactic or different strategy to go about this, this is his right, and it is a right that I will defend to my last breath for the simple reason that it is his right to do it, and he is right to do it. Let me explain what I mean by that. The reason we are even here having this discussion is because we have some individuals who serve in the Pentagon, in the Department of Defense, who have lost sight of which is the branch of government in which they serve. We want them to be able, ready, willing at a moment's notice to do everything they need to do in order to defend this great Nation--the greatest civilization the world has ever known. To that end, their job is to serve in an executive capacity, not in a legislative capacity. These are not mere abstractions; these are fundamental, bedrock principles of our system of government. Two independent provisions of the Constitution make this clear. Article I, section I, clause 1--the very first operative provision of the entire Constitution--says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives. Article I, section VII of the Constitution makes this point doubly clear: that you cannot, may not, will not, must not ever pass a law, change a law that is a Federal law in our system unless you have a few things happen. You have to have passage in the House and passage in the Senate. Most of the time, it doesn't matter in which order; it just has to be the same legislative text. That text must then be transmitted to the President-- or presented, as we call it--for signature, veto, or acquiescence. If the President signs it or acquiesces, it becomes law. If the President vetoes it, it is returned to our respective Chambers, and it will not become law unless two-thirds of the Members of both Houses of Congress choose to overturn that veto. Here is why this matters: We have had in place since 1984 a set of laws--laws that had been amended in 1996 and then again in 2003--that today are codified in 10 U.S.C., section 1093. Those laws make clear that you cannot use Department of Defense funds or Department of Defense facilities or property for abortions. You cannot do that. You cannot do that in the absence of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is in jeopardy unless the abortion happens. This, in turn, reflects a very simple and very longlasting truth among the American people, which is the American people come at the abortion issue from a wide variety of perspectives. There are some who believe that life begins at conception and that anything from that moment forward cannot be justified. There are others who believe that, until the baby is actually born and takes its first breath, the baby has no legally cognizable, protectable rights. There are some who would take that even further. I find it difficult to accept that some feel that way, but some really do. Even though Americans find themselves at very different positions along this ideological spectrum specifically related to the issue of abortion, there is one point that unites Americans overwhelmingly and I mean to the tune of three out of four. Something in the range of about 75 percent of Americans agree on one thing--one thing--when it comes to abortion: You should not, must not ever use Federal taxpayer funds for abortion. Why? Well, pro-life Americans, I think, find this explanation obvious. They don't like abortion anyway, so they don't want government funding. But it appears that about half the people who are not pro- life, who believe in some policies that recognize that somebody ought to have the ability to get an abortion--about half of them, it turns out, believe that we still shouldn't use Federal funds to do that because a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with that, and it is with good reason. These policies have been around for a really long time and with good reason. Even though overall preferences, strategies, beliefs, public opinions about abortion have changed from time to time, this one has remained overwhelmingly against the use of public funds. So it was surprising and alarming to my friend Senator Tuberville when, about a year ago, he started hearing rumors--rumors to the effect that the Pentagon would begin using Federal funds to facilitate abortions. He went and did as any faithful member of the Senate Armed Services Committee would: He met with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, and he said: Look, I don't know whether these rumors are true, but if they are true, I find them alarming, and if they turn out to be true, I will have no choice as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee but to make sure that there are consequences to you if you take this lawless act. He had good reason to point this out. Look, the only reason for that policy, the only fathomable reason, is to circumvent the plain purpose, intent, effect of 10 U.S.C., section 1093. That is the only reason it is there, and they have written it ever so craftily so as to be able to have a colorable argument. I think it is an argument that flies in the face of the stated purpose, intent, effect of this Federal statute, 10 U.S.C., section 1093. It is so that they could argue: Well, we are not using it to perform the abortion; we are just using it to fly people to get the abortion, and then we are using it to pay for 3 weeks of paid leave time for anyone who has gone to get the abortion. We are going to pay their travel, their room and board, and everything else. We will pay for everything else around the abortion, but because we are not paying for the abortion itself, we are in the clear. Now, Senator Tuberville recognized something very important: that the sole purpose of this policy would be to circumvent Federal law and to make it difficult to impossible to challenge it in a court of law. I will get back to that in a moment. So he did something right then and there--something that, whether you agree with the tactic used or not, you have to find admirable. He has taken the bull by the horns. He utilized the resources at his disposal, which is what any Division I champion football coach would do. He did it, and he said: OK. If you do this, that is fine. I suppose-- well, it is not fine, but, you know, it is your prerogative to do that. But if you do that, I am going to exercise my prerogatives as a Senator, and my prerogatives as a Senator are such that I can require you to take the long way, the long road, the long and more difficult path instead of the shorter path that we nearly always use when we are confirming flag officer military personnel--that is, generals and admirals as well as political appointees--within the Department of Defense. Now, let's understand something about a ``hold.'' A ``hold'' is not an inexorable block. It is not damning these people to Senate confirmation hell. It doesn't have that power. That is above his pay grade--all of ours. What he is doing is saying: There is the fast path, and there is the slow path. We always use the fast path, but that requires the acquiescence, the agreement, the unanimous consent of all 100 of us. If you don't do that, I, Senator Tuberville, will make you take the slow path. Secretary Austin is a decorated war hero. Secretary Austin has been around for a long time. He knows the Senate. He knows the Pentagon well. He knew the risks. He chose to play chicken. He chose to look a U.S. Senator in the eye and say: Thank you. I will take that under advisement. And, in a cowardly moment, he decided to arrogate to himself power that does not belong to him because the Constitution of the United States doesn't give it to him because you can't legislate from the E- ring of the Pentagon. No matter how strongly he feels, no matter how compelling his urge to facilitate the performance of abortion using Federal funds contrary to public opinion, contrary to Federal law, he does not have that power. Shame on him. It is to his everlasting shame that he would arrogate to himself that power and then have the audacity to blame Senator Tuberville for the slowdown that he himself knowingly, willfully, shamefully created. So we now get back to this point that is impacting military readiness, that is creating an inconvenience for the flag officers who have been nominated. We are hearing now that it is even affecting people at a level below the flag officers. Now, that is curious because Senator Tuberville has never imposed holds--none of these holds have applied with regard to anybody below a flag officer level--general, admiral, one star, two star, three star, four star, or political appointee DOD-wide. Never. They haven't. So I really don't know where that argument is coming from. Perhaps they are saying it has a spillover effect downstream. Maybe that is the case. If that is the case, then I hope they will be clear in making that argument because otherwise that argument is just false; it is just not true. In any event, he is not stopping them. He is not stopping one of them. He is saying: You just have to take the slow path. So let's be clear here. There are exactly two ways--two ways--that, regardless of Senator Tuberville's holds, regardless of whether he ever budges an inch, we can take care of this. Approach 1 could happen tonight. I guess it is technically morning. What is it? It is 12:56 or so a.m., so we will say this morning. Right now, President Biden, if you are watching TV, pay attention. I am going to give you a really easy recipe to follow. You can do this even at 1 a.m. President Biden, if you are not awake, you really should be watching this because this is compelling television. If you are staffing President Biden tonight, you might go wake him up. I think he will really enjoy this. I think he will enjoy it a lot. It is much easier to do than riding a bike, and you are not going to fall over while doing it. All you have to do is suspend your Godless, lawless abortion travel policy. Just suspend it right now. If this is affecting military readiness, so be it. End it. End it tonight. You have a duty to do that. Lloyd Austin, you can do it, too. Suspend your abortion travel policy. Now, look, I know you guys feel really passionately about abortion. I know that for whatever reason, you have lost your freaking minds ever since that fateful day in June of 2022 when the Supreme Court of the United States ended a nearly half-century-long judicial hegemony over the issue of abortion. It ended that because, well, it turns out the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion, and by saying nothing about abortion, it leaves the issue of abortion to elected lawmakers, not to nine lawyers dressed in robes. Most of the time, that means they leave the issue of abortion to State lawmakers, not Federal ones, because most of the time, it is not our role anyway. I know, President Biden and Secretary Austin, you have been really upset about that. Why? Because, well, for a long time, the Supreme Court of the United States on this issue that is so important to you-- why, I will never understand, but I understand that you are mad because the Supreme Court, for that long period of time, was acting as your superlegislature that was willing to do your bidding and that of your party's. Your infanticidal ambitions were facilitated by this superlegislature across the street. The only problem is, they didn't have any authority to do that--none. It cannot be found. So when they abandoned it, the day they abandoned it, President Biden announced all sorts of ambitious, whole-of- government approaches to effectively nullify a ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States--a ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States that is legally, constitutionally unimpeachable. From that moment forward, you declared your own little jihad on the Dobbs ruling and on the Supreme Court. You have been trying to delegitimize Justice Alito, Justice Thomas, Justice Barrett, Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Gorsuch ever since then. You have threatened, through members of your party and through your appointment of this silly Commission you created, to pack the Supreme Court of the United States notwithstanding the fact that you, President Biden, stood on this very Senate floor decades ago and said correctly that it was a boneheaded idea when Franklin D. Roosevelt last threatened to pack the Supreme Court of the United States in 1937. It is a boneheaded idea today. You have been doing that. Meanwhile, you try to do everything you can to make the lives of those Justices hell. You have completely ignored 18 U.S.C., section 1507--a law that has been violated again and again and again outside the homes of the six Supreme Court Justices who had the courage and who had the appropriate jurisprudential temperament to recognize that abortion is not made theirs anywhere in the Constitution. You have ignored the fact that people come to their homes to protest, that they come to the homes of these Justices to protest against them, disturbing them on vacation and when they are at home with their families; ignored the fact that people are showing up to the homes of these Justices not just to disturb their peace but to send a signal loudly and clearly, unmistakably, over and over and over again, that says: We know where you sleep. We know where your children lay their heads at night. Yet, President Biden, you do nothing to enforce that. Your Attorney General has instructed Federal law enforcement personnel, effectively, to stand down, ignore these violations. Shame on you, President Biden. Look, I get that. Oh, that is in your little empire. You are the head of Article II. You are the head of the executive branch. If you don't want to enforce the law, we can't make you, just like we can't make you enforce the border as 8 million illegal immigrants have come across the border, carrying with them enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman, and child in America. And many of them have died, to the tune of hundreds of thousands. We can't make you enforce the law because you are the head of the executive branch. The head of the executive branch enforces the law--or it is supposed to. We can't make you do that. But do you know what we can do? We can defend our own prerogative to make the law. Sure, once the law is made, you get to enforce it or decide not to. You shouldn't--and shame on you for not--but you get to decide that. You cannot make the law. You cannot rewrite the law. And shame on you, President Biden, for blaming this man. This man who is just trying to stand up for the law and for the unborn, you are blaming him for our supposed lack of military readiness. I can't believe anybody buys this crap--I really can't--let alone anyone from the same party as Senator Tuberville. We have all been elected on pro-life stances. Now, I understand, not everybody is going to share the same strategy. Not every one of us would choose this same approach. I didn't. But you are blaming the wrong guy. There is an empty chair here--two of them, in fact; two empty chairs occupied by two executive branch individuals: Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden, who could end this tonight, but they refuse to do so. That is avenue No. 1 for which we could end this. Avenue No. 2, we could do as Senator Tuberville told Secretary Austin we would do from the very outset; that is, we could confirm them the slow way. We went 40 consecutive days and nights--kind of Biblical, really, if you think about it--without a single vote in August. We are about to go 10 or 11 more consecutive days and nights without a single vote. We have gone days even when we were in session, where we will cast maybe one or two votes, at the most, and sometimes none. There are ways in which you can tee these people up. You know the rules, Senator Schumer. You know how to call these people up. You know how to tee these up for a vote. Yet we are down here tonight--all of us Republicans. When we talk about military readiness, why on Earth are we not aiming our remarks at President Biden or at Secretary Austin? Why on Earth are we not directing them at Senator Schumer? They all have the ability to end this. With Schumer, it would take longer. It would require more of an investment of time on our part, sure. Why are we not directing our arrows at them? Why are they going to Tuberville instead? I don't get it. As to the suggestion made by one of my colleagues--my friend, distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from South Carolina--that this ought to be resolved in court; that courts of law are where we argue legal disputes; that most nearly all legal disputes should be resolved there, that is just wrong. That is just dead wrong. The fact is, as any lawyer, any member of the bar, any officer of the court knows, most legal disputes never make it to court. There are a lot of reasons for this. Some of them involve expensive litigation. Some of them involve jurisprudential standards that don't always permit a legal challenge to be brought. Among other things, you have to establish what is called Article III standing. You have got to show an injury, in fact, squarely traceable to the conduct of the defendant that is capable of being redressed by a court of competent jurisdiction. Many cases, many disputes arise in a context in which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find someone with Article III standing who is even allowed to challenge these things in Federal court. I, respectfully, submit that it is like a needle in a haystack, in a haystack on a distant planet, a really, really difficult case in which to even imagine, even fathom someone with Article III standing who could do it. Senator Graham referred to some legal experts, legal scholars whom I respect and admire, who have been looking into this. I have looked at their written work product, and it is excellent, but even they acknowledged it is not at all clear you could even find anyone with standing. This is exactly the kind of case that needs to be argued, that needs to be settled not in the courts of law because it can't; it must be resolved here, here in the branch of government that is charged with making the law and that is also charged with overseeing the branches of government that execute, implement, and enforce the law-- the executive branch. That is our job. This is where it has to be done. So, look, if you want to give the farm away, if you want to say we are just going to leave it alone, that is fine. But let's not kid ourselves. No court is coming to the rescue. It is not going to work. You are not going to find anyone with standing, I can almost guarantee you. And even if you can find somebody with standing, they have crafted this thing so deliberately, so maliciously, so carefully as to make it nearly impossible for anyone who even could establish standing--which they can't--to succeed on the merits because at the end of the day, they will look at them, and they will say: Gosh, shucks, we didn't do that. We didn't perform any abortions. All we did is we just, you know, drove the people to the State or flew the people to the State where they are going to get the abortion, and then we paid for their motel, their room, board, lodging, gave them 3 weeks of per diem in order to do it. No, we didn't do any of that. So by a rigid, textual analysis, which probably would be the one that would prevail in a court of law, you would lose. Even if you could find somebody with Article III standing--which you can't; you are not going to find that--what remedy is there? If we are we are going to allow the laws that our branch of government has made, if we are going to allow that law or the law in general to be an ask, then, fine, let it go. But let's not kid ourselves. This isn't getting fixed in a court of law. We have got the remedy here. Whether you agree with Senator Tuberville's initial decision to do it this way or not, don't spit on me and tell me it is raining. Don't walk in here and tell me there is another solution. Don't walk in here and tell me that courts of law are where all legal disputes have to be resolved when you know darn well a lot of them can't, and this one sure as heck won't be. It saddens me deeply that this many brave men and women have been delayed. It troubles me deeply to consider the many families whose lives have been disrupted by this. But I respectfully submit, with all the passion I am capable of communicating at 1:10 in the morning, at a bare minimum, you are wrong to just blame him. I don't think you should be blaming him at all. Secretary Austin and President Biden, you set in motion a sequence of events that you knew darn well would culminate in this very thing. You knew darn well that you would use this as an opportunity for demagoguery. That is not cool. I object.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, reserving the right to object, we live in a great country. It is a country that has thrived precisely because we have sought, since the moment of our founding, to live under the rule of law; that when we make a law, we do our best to follow it. It doesn't always work that smoothly. I know the process of making law and enforcing law and interpreting the law can be messy. People have strong opinions about what the law ought to be, how it ought to be enforced, what the law means. But, you know, we have been at our best when we accept the fundamental premise that although the task may be difficult and although people might reach different conclusions regarding what the law should be, how the law ought to be enforced, and how it ought to be interpreted, that there is a right answer. We might not all agree on what the right answer is, but if we agree that there is a right answer and it is our obligation to find it and then defend it once we have found it, we are going to be better off. One of the things that differentiated our form of government from that of our mother country is the twin set of structural protections in the Constitution that separate and divide power. Our Founding Fathers understood, through sad experience, that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men and women everywhere, as soon as they get a little authority, a little power, that they will begin to exercise what we call unrighteous dominion; that is, they have a tendency to abuse their power. They have a tendency to become tyrants, petty or grand. To that end, they understood something about human nature. They understood what Madison described in Federalist No. 51; that if men were angels, we would have no need of government. If we had access to angels to govern us, we wouldn't need rules, we wouldn't need constraints around government power. But, alas, we are not angels. We don't have access to angels. Angels are not to be found among us, certainly not in the E-Ring of the Pentagon, certainly not in the White House today. They are no angels, neither are we. But we have rules. To that end, our Founding Fathers sought to subdivide power, to slice it and dice it. In short, they separated out power along two axes, establishing these two fundamental structural protections that really have helped foster the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. The first of these structural protections operates on a vertical axis. We call that Federalism. It says that most power in our system of government doesn't belong in Washington, DC. It doesn't belong at the national level. It belongs at the State and local level where most of the power is reserved. It says that only a few powers designated as Federal, as national, by the Constitution will be lodged within the Federal Government. Among those powers, just a few basic national authorities: the power to regulate trade or commerce between the States, with foreign nations, and with the Indian Tribes; the power to come up with a uniform system of weights and measures, a uniform system of immigration and nationality laws; the power to develop courts inferior to the Supreme Court of the United States, a system of bankruptcy laws and bankruptcy courts; the power to declare war, to establish an army and a navy and to regulate the militia, what we today call the National Guard. And there is my favorite power, too often referred to as the power to grant letters of marque and reprisal. Marque, in this context, is spelled m-a-r-q-u-e. The letter of marque and reprisal, to put it succinctly, is basically a hall pass issued by Congress in the name of the United States that allows the person possessing it to engage in state-sponsored acts of piracy on the high seas. In short, you get to be a pirate. Each of these powers are relatively minor. All of them together are still relatively minor compared to the bulk of the power reserved to the State and local governments around the country. To the extent that we have respected those limits, those distinctions between State and Federal power, we have benefited materially as a country. Tragically, over the last 86 years, we have deviated from that, and that has caused problems. It has spilled over and helped erode not just the vertical protection we call Federalism but also the horizontal protection we call separation of powers. And I will turn to that now. Under the principle of separation of powers within the Federal Government, the Founding Fathers set up three distinct branches. One branch, the legislative branch headed by Congress, consisting of a House and Senate, would make the laws. Subdivided between these two branches, these two Chambers of the legislative branch--because they knew that it would be more difficult to abuse the power if you split it up more, so they did--another branch, the executive branch, headed by an elected President, whose job it is to enforce the laws--or it is, at least, supposed to be; and a third branch headed by the Supreme Court and including such inferior courts as Congress might choose to ordain and establish from time to time, whose job it is to interpret the laws. Now, between these three powers--let's face it--they are not really equal branches. They are coordinate branches, but they are not equal in their power. By far, the most dangerous branch is the branch that we inhabit and is the branch in which we serve, in which we find ourselves this fine evening, because the power to make law is the most dangerous power in government. And it is for that very reason, Mr. President, the Founding Fathers wouldn't entrust that to anyone other than the branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals--because it is dangerous. The other two branches, if you think about it, really exercise powers that are derivative of ours in one way or the other. The laws that the executive enforces must first be passed by us. The laws the judicial branch interprets must first be passed by us. That is why it is so important that we safeguard this, that we make sure that no one else from outside the legislative branch of government seizes that power. Why? Because they are not accountable to the people at the most regular intervals. You can fire every Member of the House of Representatives every 2 years. Their voters have the chance to do that with all of them every 2 years. From the Speaker of the House to the most junior Member, they can all be fired by their constituents every 2 years. A third of us in this Chamber can be fired every 2 years. My constituents opted not to do that last year. I had the chance, and they decided to keep me for another 6 years, and I am grateful for that. But we are all accountable. That same accountability does not apply in the executive branch. It sure as heck doesn't apply in the judicial branch. It is one of many reasons why you can't legislate from the E- Ring of the Pentagon. You cannot make a new law, you cannot change existing law from the executive branch. Now, I know. I know. I know. We have gotten lazy. We have gotten lazy because since April 12, 1937, a day which should live in infamy in American history but a day that is seldom even mentioned, much less studied in grade school, intermediate school, high school, college, even most law schools, is the day the Supreme Court messed it all up, really leading to the erosion of both the vertical protection we call Federalism and the horizontal protection we call separation of powers. April 12, 1937--that was the day when the Supreme Court of the United States, by a vote of 5 to 4 in a case called National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, reinterpreted one provision of the Constitution--article I, section 8, clause 3--the Commerce Clause, to mean something different, something different than it had ever meant. Ever. It had always meant, prior to that time, that Congress had the power to regulate a couple of things: No. 1, interstate commercial transactions. Person A lives in Virginia, wants to sell tobacco to person B living in Maryland. That interstate commercial transaction can't adequately be covered by the laws of either Virginia or Maryland, so Federal law has the ability to cover it--interstate commercial transactions. Secondly, channels or instrumentalities of interstate commerce: interstate airways, airwaves, waterways, and so forth, because, there again, the laws of no State are sufficient to cover that interstate event-- something carrying something else or someone else across interstate lines. Prior to that time, that is all the Commerce Clause meant. On April 12, 1937, the Supreme Court amended the Constitution, amended it without going through the article V amendment process, a process that is deliberately difficult. Why? Well, because that is the whole darn point of having a Constitution, is to make it difficult to change. Some of our laws must not be easy to change. So the Supreme Court amended the Constitution, gave themselves power that was not theirs to redefine it, to include any power that, when measured in the aggregate, though, carried out intrastate--not part of an interstate commercial transaction, not part of a channel or instrumentality of interstate commerce, in the aggregate, had a substantial effect on interstate commerce. What does that mean? Well, that is all legalese for Congress can regulate just about anything it wants. If it can dream it, it can regulate it, as long as it uses the right words. Since April 12, 1937, the Supreme Court has invalidated exactly two laws--only two laws--as outside Congress's Commerce Clause power--one involving provisions of the Gun-Free School Zones Act in a 1995 decision called the United States v. Lopez and another case involving a few provisions of the Violence Against Women Act in the year 2000 in a case called United States v. Morris. There is a third case that arguably makes the list but, ultimately, gets cut from that list--NFIB v. Sebelius--which the Supreme Court decided in 2012, concluding that the ObamaCare individual mandate was, in fact, in violation of, in excess of Congress's Commerce Clause authority but then went on to rewrite the same statute--not once, but twice--in order to save it from an otherwise inevitable finding of unconstitutionality. So that one doesn't count. So because since pretty much everything has been part of our legislative prerogative, Congress has choked on its own power. Members of Congress couldn't handle that much power. Members of Congress didn't want to go to all the work of all that power. So Members of Congress started delegating out the lawmaking powers to other branches of government. In short, we have gotten lazy, we have gotten sloppy; and it has inured to the everlasting detriment of the American people, who find themselves subject to a Byzantine labyrinth of Federal regulations that cost the American economy between $2 and $3 trillion a year to comply with. Those compliance costs are borne not by big, wealthy, blue-chip corporations or some guy that you imagine wearing a double-breasted suit and a monocle like Mr. Peanut. No; they are borne by hard-working Americans who pay higher prices on goods and services and everything they buy, and they pay for it also with diminished wages, unemployment, and underemployment. These things are not free, you see. You mess with Federalism, you destroy Federal separation of powers. Incidentally, you know how this decision was arrived at? Well, Associate Justice Owen Roberts panicked. He got scared because President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court of the United States with as many as 15 Justices. Justice Owen Roberts, looking outside the case, looking beyond the law, decided to just rewrite the Constitution rather than run the risk of Court packing. Shameful, really, but it led to where we are now. I keep in my office two stacks of documents behind my desk. One stack is short. It is a few inches tall. It consists of the laws passed by Congress during the previous year. It is usually a few hundred to a few thousand pages long. It stands about that high. The other stack of documents, during any given year, will come to a mass of about a 13- foot-tall stack. I keep them in three adjacent bookcases. These are in bound volumes, double-sided, very small print, very thin pages. Last year's Federal Register. The current year's Federal Register--our current Federal Register, by the end of this year, will have reached about 100,000 pages. These pages contain law--new law, law that, if not complied with, can land you in prison, can get you fined, can get you banned from this or that Federal program. It can deprive you of life, liberty, property just the same as any law passed by Congress, only it is not a law passed by Congress. It is reminiscent of Federalist No. 62 in which James Madison, rather eerily and with great prescience, warned it will be of little avail to the American people that their laws may be written by men of their own choosing if those laws be so voluminous, complex, and ever-changing that they can't be read and understood by the American people, if they can't know from one day to the next what the law is today and what it will be tomorrow. Those words still echo in our ears today when we see not only are those laws so voluminous and ever-changing and complex that we can't read and understand the law, know what it means and says from one day to the next; they are not even written by men and women of our own choosing. That is why it matters, that this document written back in 1787 still matters. We have all sworn an oath to uphold it. And what it means is you can't legislate from the E-Ring of the Pentagon. You can't make a law, you can't change an existing Federal law from the executive branch of government, unless you are the President of the United States and your sole role in lawmaking is signing, vetoing, or acquiescing to a law duly passed by the House and the Senate. You can't make a law; you can't change a law--not from the E-Ring of the Pentagon, not from the Oval Office, not from any quarter of any part of this town or this great land or this entire world outside of this Chamber and the Chamber just down the hall from us. That is why it matters. So, yeah, this is about life. Yeah, this is also about the military. But we swore an oath to that Constitution. We swore an oath that we will make the law; we will not delegate that law to somebody else; we are not going to let somebody else make the law--especially a law that is destructive of life, liberty, and property, as that is, ultimately, the sole purpose of government: to protect life, liberty, and property. Quite ironically, the bigger, the more out-of-control, the more unrestrained, the more unaccountable any government becomes, it is inevitably the consequence of that government that it becomes destructive of life, liberty, and property. That is how we got to where we are here, where a branch of government not entitled to make the law has made law and has made law to facilitate the taking of unborn human life. My colleagues who are here tonight, whom I love and respect, are blaming the wrong culprit. It is not Tommy Tuberville. It is Joe Biden, Lloyd Austin, and Chuck Schumer. Let's keep that blame where it belongs. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that this can be remedied in court. It can't. It won't. We all know that. We are going to stand up for the unborn who cannot speak for themselves. We are going to have to do it. If we are going to prevent somebody else from making law when it is not their prerogative, it has to be us. Mr. President, I object.

Mr. LEE. Will the Senator yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. I have got a question relative to that. Will the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. Will the gentleman yield for a question?

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the late Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., used to say: There is a point of contact in every case. He defined that point of contact as the place where the boy got his finger caught in the machinery. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin got his finger caught in the machinery. Hence, defining the point of contact in this case, in this dispute, when he decided to circumvent the plain intent and effect of 10 U.S.C. 1093, plainly prohibiting the use of DOD funds to perform abortions. He did that with clear intent to avoid the impact of the law while purporting to comply with it. He did so shamefully. I appreciate my colleagues Senator Ernst and Senator Sullivan for their service to our country. Their service, along with that of Senators Graham and Young, who were with us earlier tonight, is admirable, as is their service in the U.S. Senate. The service to our country exhibited by Senator Tuberville is no less to be commended, no less to be admired. I, frankly, resent the suggestion, to the extent anyone is making it, that he is any less qualified to make these arguments simply because of the fact that he hasn't worn that uniform. He has every bit the right to do that. I do appreciate the comments made by my colleague Senator Ernst moments ago to the effect that this is, in fact, President Biden's fault; this is, in fact, Secretary Lloyd Austin's fault; that this is, in fact, Senator Chuck Schumer's fault. I appreciate that. Nonetheless, the majority of the remarks that we have heard tonight, this morning, have not suggested in any way, shape, or form that the true call to action really is being directed to President Biden, to Secretary Austin, or to Senator Schumer. We have been asked the question over and over again: Why punish the innocent? Indeed, why punish the innocent? Do you know who is innocent? Babies. Do you know who doesn't have a voice in the Senate? Babies. Do you know who can't speak for themselves? Babies. You know, a baby doesn't have a name. A baby doesn't have a military rank. A baby doesn't have a professional career upon which to rely, upon which he or she can have people rallying around the baby in defense of that baby's life. It is one of the many reasons why Congress saw fit to adopt 10 U.S.C section 1039: to make sure that the Federal Government didn't contribute to this. The U.S. Department of Defense is supposed to kill America's enemies, not her babies. Regardless of how you feel about pro-life issues, you have got to accept the fact that Americans, by a margin of three out of four, are not willing to tolerate the expenditure of U.S. taxpayer funds for abortions. This isn't honorable; this isn't noble. And, no, you cannot conflate this. You can't distract from it. You can't obfuscate the barbarism inherent in this policy simply by referring to the illustrious resumes, to the amazing job qualifications of one-, two-, three-, and four-star Generals. It doesn't fix the problem, not even for an instant. It begs the question: How many future Generals, how many future Admirals are going to be aborted by this policy, by the Pentagon itself? Who can't go out and hold a press conference? Well, we are told tonight it is the one-, two-, three-, four-star Admirals and Generals. Babies also can't do that. My colleagues posited over and over again tonight in a way that I found, frankly, very offensive, that we are somehow afraid to have the credentials of these military men and women read from the Senate floor. If they think that they read us wrong, 180 degrees wrong, we are not afraid of that, not for an instant. Our quarrel is not with them. Our quarrel is with those who would circumvent the law in order to kill children. Any society that sacrifices babies for the convenience of adults is in for a rough ride. I resent, also, the fact that some on the Senate floor tonight have implicitly challenged our patriotism, our gratitude for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines, even our national security, because we stand behind one man's effort to protect the unborn who can't speak for themselves, who can't fight for themselves, who don't have a name or a military rank to secure their position in life. We have been told over and over again that these one-, two-, three-, and four-star Generals and Admirals are being punished for something they had nothing to do with. Here again, the same can be said of the babies whose will be snuffed out with the assistance of U.S. taxpayer dollars. We are told over and over again about how pro-life these speakers are. And I don't doubt that they are, but one minute they are uttering those words, and the very next minute they are accusing Senator Tuberville of jeopardizing our national security or not caring about the families of these individuals. I am sorry. That is not fair, nor is it helpful for them to dismiss it or passive aggressively suggest: Well, we just have to deal with this. We just have to find a solution. Well, then find one. Look, I get it. They don't love the tactic he has chosen. It is not the one I chose, not the one they chose. But it is what he has chosen. If they are going to passively aggressively tell him that he has to find another solution to protect the unborn, then they had darned well better direct him to one. But they haven't. The closest they have come is to suggest litigation. Litigation is of no avail. There is not any plausible existing human who has article III standing to challenge this. And, moreover, even if we could find one--which we can't--this is the kind of insult to the law, the kind of violation of the law, the kind of effort to circumvent the law that is not likely to prevail in the courts. It is almost certainly doomed to it. So, no, litigation doesn't solve the problem. That is, moreover, just punting to the judicial branch of government something that is a distinctively legislative task. That doesn't do it for me. The fact that they say over and over again, ``There has got to be a better way,'' if there is one, then help him find it. But don't just tell him he is wrong for standing up for this without giving him a plausible path in a different direction. Let me outline just a couple of different paths that I think we could pursue--and I would like their help in getting them. I would like to know whether they would be willing to join with us. Why not have Republican Senators say, We are not going to pass the National Defense Authorization Act unless we fix this issue? Why not have them sign up and say, We as Republicans either aren't going to do that, we are not going give another dime to nonmilitary aid to Ukraine or to Gaza or who knows whatever else, unless they fix this problem in statute or unless the Pentagon and the White House withdraw its abortion travel funding policy? Those are just a couple of ideas. Those are actually productive ideas. And I would love to know whether they would be willing to join the fight in that, whether they would be willing to help us get 41 signatures on a letter committing to do one of those things. Did they offer that tonight? No. They just continue to pay lip service to the notion that this is Joe Biden's and Lloyd Austin's fault and Chuck Schumer's fault, but all the time they are pointing the finger to Tommy Tuberville. That is not fair. We owe him better than that. We who campaign on the banner of pro-life owe Tommy Tuberville more than that. We owe the unborn of this country more than that. We can do better. But to do better, we have to actually act. I am glad that one man in this body is willing to stand up for the unborn, and it is an honor and privilege for me to stand with him. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I understand there is a bill at the desk, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. LEE. I now ask for a second reading, but in order to place the bill on the calendar under the provisions of rule XIV, I object to my own request.

Mr. LEE. I yield the floor.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be vitiated.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the quorum call be vitiated.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, this is a moment in history where we have the chance to stand up and provide assistance to an ally, an important ally, in a tough part of the world that has a lot of enemies in common with the United States. Israel was savagely attacked without provocation on the morning of October 7 of this year, just over a month ago. The most unspeakably savage human attacks were carried out on men and women of Israel whose offense was simple: living in Israel. The people of Hamas wanted them dead because of the fact that they are Jewish and they live in Israel. Their humanity, their religion, their ancestry, and their geography all qualified them to be deemed unworthy of living by the savages of Hamas. These savages will continue in their butchery and, in so doing, degrade humanity for as long as they can get away with it. Longstanding relationships between the United States and Israel have set us on a course in which we can reasonably be expected to provide reasonable assistance to Israel. Now, to be clear, what Israel is asking of us is not grand. They are not asking us to go there and fight their war for them, nor are they asking us to provide hundreds of billions of dollars over many years in order to help them achieve that effort--no. It is a relatively modest request that they are making of us. Compared to other requests that we are considering from other parts of the world, including and especially from Ukraine, this is a modest one. This is, moreover, an effort that they believe they can carry out successfully in a matter of weeks or months, not something spanning out over the better part of a decade. Finally, there is overwhelming bipartisan, bicameral support for aid to Israel. It has already passed the House of Representatives. It is done. We could bring it up right now, we could pass it today, and it could be on the desk of the President of the United States at the Oval Office, just a few blocks from here, by tonight. To my knowledge, there is not a single Member of this body who would object to collapsing, consolidating the otherwise burdensome and time- consuming process that it takes to bring a bill to the floor at the U.S. Senate. We could have this done today, and I predict that the vote would be overwhelming--if not unanimous, then very nearly so--with the number of dissenting votes probably in the single digits, probably in the low single digits, if, in fact, there were any ``no'' votes at all. So the point here is that you have two proposals, two ideas to offer support in two different conflicts. One is overwhelmingly popular and bipartisan and could easily pass both Houses. The other is troubling and fraught with questions and also happens to be the proposal--the one for Ukraine--that is a lot more expensive and that involves a conflict that is now, we are being told, a conflict that is likely to stretch out for the better part of a decade with no end in sight. And that is a conflict wherein--since the beginning of last year, we have spent $113 billion on the conflict in Ukraine. They are, moreover, analytically distinct, just as they are geographically distinct. They involve different considerations. We opt to consider them together. This is one of the real maladies of Washington today, is the fact that, in many instances, Congress can't seem to resist the impulse to consolidate support for one thing and use that as leverage to bring about support for something else for which there is no comparably large, bipartisan, broad-based support. That is unfortunate. The people of Israel need this aid now. Let's get this done now. We will consider Ukraine on its own merits. There is no reason to delay. We should bring this up today, get it passed today, and get it signed into law this very evening.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I appreciate the passion with which the Senator from South Carolina has delivered his remarks today. I am also grateful for his willingness to adopt a minor modification in the savings clause, clarifying that nothing in this legislation may be construed as independently authorizing the use of military force against Iran or any country. It is something we should do independently. So I am grateful for the Senator from South Carolina's willingness to work with me on that and that he has agreed to do it. The junior Senator from Kentucky, Senator Paul, has suffered a death in his family and is away today attending the funeral of that immediate family member. At his request, I am here to object on his behalf. On behalf of Senator Paul, I object.

Mr. LEE

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, when the government shuts its doors, public attention often falls on our national parks. This should be surprising to no one. Year after year, whenever anyone does a survey, they discover the most popular and least popular parks of the Federal government. The answers tend to be the same. As I recall, the least popular parks often focus on the IRS, for understandable reasons. For similarly understandable reasons, the most popular parks involve our National Park System. When the government shuts down, a lot of attention turns to them, as it should. The stark ``closed'' sign that barricades the entrance to our cherished parks is more than just a sign of circumstances where it arises during a shutdown. It is a palpable consequence of a government bereft of funds and a dysfunctional process in Congress that leads to that moment. This issue is close to the hearts of a lot of people in a lot of parts of the country, but it is especially close to the hearts of people in my home State of Utah. Every State in this great Union, especially every State that is fortunate enough to be home to one or more of our Nation's national parks, has to deal with some of these issues in one way another. To be clear, I abhor the notion of government shutdowns. They are neither my wish nor my aspiration. However, as the close of fiscal year 2023 approaches, a government shutdown looms very large on our horizon. Utah, like many States, finds its identity intertwined with its magnificent landscapes and national parks. Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef--these are not just names on a map; they are proud symbols of our State, and local communities in many parts of Utah depend on them and depend on the traffic that comes in and out of those national parks. Visiting these parks isn't just about tourism; it is about livelihoods, our families, and our economic lifeblood. The grim reality is that our communities will bear the brunt if these parks, in fact, close their gates due to a shutdown with no means to recuperate the loss. With 2 days left, my frustration mounts knowing the Department of the Interior has not updated its shutdown contingency plan for national parks since 2017. How can the Biden administration expect our communities to prepare without a blueprint for such eventualities? In my recent communication with Secretary Haaland, I emphasized that numerous tools lie at her disposal to keep our parks functioning even during a shutdown. Using the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, or FLREA, as it is known, to harness nonappropriated fee revenues for essential park operations is a clear path and one that should be pursued here. After all, these very same funds ensure many parks remained open during the December 2018 to January 2019 shutdown. The Department of the Interior should also designate as ``essential'' as many park and land management employees as possible. Yet it seems Interior would, instead, echo past mistakes, like those made in 2013 under the Obama administration, bending to radical environmental pressures and closing our parks under the pretense of ``resource conservation.'' This is not just unfortunate; it is inexcusable. In fact, it is deplorable, and it is completely avoidable. Because of such actions, several States, including Utah, were forced to dig into their own pockets to ensure their parks remained open in 2013, but when the shutdown concluded, there was no repayment. States like Utah, New York, Tennessee, South Dakota, Colorado, and Arizona were left holding the bill. Utah alone spent $1.6 million to keep our parks operational for just about a week. Now, look, $1.6 million might seem like a drop in the bucket in the vast sea of overall Federal spending, but for States like Utah with a lot less money running through the State government than runs through our government every single year and where elected officials value prudent financial management to help keep their own citizens in a good position, every single dollar matters. So this is not something we should foist upon the States. We know at the outset that people are going to continue to visit national parks. There is no legitimate reason, knowing that they are the single most popular feature of the Federal Government, arbitrarily to decide at the outset that we are going to close those. In many instances, they had to erect barriers to keep people out--sort of the opposite of what you would expect to occur during a shutdown. So let's keep them open. We know, in any event, that any furloughed staff within the Park Service will be repaid, along with the rest of the government workers, once the shutdown ends. Knowing that, as we do, and knowing that these States and their communities are so dependent, as they are, on revenue related to visitors going to national parks and that those States, being that dependent, are going to cover the tab, the Federal Government shouldn't be in the position of riding on these States' generosity, on their dependence on the national parks, simply by saying: Yes, you know what, we are going to furlough these workers, allow them to shut down, allow the States to run the parks at great expense to those States, and then not pay them back. No, this is unacceptable. This is a pretty unique circumstance in which the risk of a free- rider action calls out for precautionary action on our part. So my bill on this subject is very simple. It just mandates that the Secretary of the Interior must repay States that spend their own funds to maintain national parks in the event of a shutdown. It is about responsibility, accountability, and most importantly, doing what is right. Our national parks must remain open, not just for the enjoyment of our citizens but for the survival of the communities that are near them and whose economies revolve around them. To that end, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2972, which is at the desk; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed; and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I am disappointed that we weren't able to get this done today. It is hard for me to conceive of a legitimate reason sounding in public policy why we wouldn't want to make sure that we hold harmless those States bold enough, brave enough, conscientious enough to protect their own citizenry and accessibility to national parks within their boundaries. There are a lot of blessings that come from having these mighty five national parks in the State of Utah. I love each and every one of them. I can tell you, there are things about every one that are unique and that I love. We are always told how lucky we are--and we, indeed, are-- to have these beautiful features in our State and to have national parks. It is insulting to the citizens of a State when the Federal Government owns two-thirds of the land mass in our State. Most of that land mass is, of course, not national parkland. Most of it doesn't even look like national parkland. Most of it is not terribly remarkable one way or another. When you add up all that land--and it is 67 percent of the State of Utah--that means we can't tax that land; that means we can't access that land except with a massive ``Mother may I?'' from the Federal Government, which is very often far too difficult to get. Because we can't collect property taxes on that land because of its Federal ownership, that impoverishes our schools, impairing our ability to fund everything from first responders, search and rescue, ambulance services, schools--you name it, it is hard for us to fund. There are counties in the State of Utah where the Federal Government owns 90-plus percent of the land, which makes it almost impossible for us to operate. To add to all of this by saying, ``Oh, by the way, during a government shutdown, we are going to shut down the single most popular feature of the Federal Government, the only part the American people really like right now, just because we can, and then we are going to pay our own employees to not work for however many days or weeks the government remains shut down--and, sure, we will let you run all of that, States, if you are concerned about it, if your economy and your people depend on it. But even though we will pay back our own employees, we are not going to pay you back.'' This is wrong, and if this is how they are going to treat us, we need to have a really long, hard, overdue discussion about the question, how much land should the Federal Government own in any particular State? At the time of statehood, there was an understanding made at least implicitly, if not explicitly, in Utah's Enabling Act consistent with language inserted into the enabling acts of nearly every State added into the Union since the Louisiana Purchase. It was our understanding that we, too, would have this opportunity to have unincorporated Federal land within our State boundaries eventually sold. Most of it would be sold if it were not dedicated to another Federal purpose. With the sale of that land would come a percentage that would flow into a trust fund dedicated for the benefit of the State's public education system. That language inserted into the enabling legislation of nearly every State added since the Louisiana Purchase has been honored. It was honored throughout the Southeast, throughout the Midwest. But they stopped honoring it when they got to the Rocky Mountains. I am not sure exactly why, but this is exactly the kind of reason why we need to have this discussion. We are told that we can't tax that land that impoverishes us, that causes all kinds of other problems. They try to offset that through a program called PILT, payment in lieu of taxes. They give the counties, the taxing jurisdictions, pennies on every dollar for what they would otherwise get. But the lost tax revenue is just the beginning of the problem if we are looking at property taxes. It is not just the lost tax revenue from what they would get for taxing that land at the lowest greenbelt rate; it is the lost economic activity that could and would otherwise apply there if they didn't own so much land. Look, think about this for a minute. If any private employer, individual, or corporation owned more than--I don't know--5 or 10 percent of the land mass in your State, people would get nervous, and understandably, justifiably so. We understandably fear the excessive accumulation of power, whether it is economic or political, in the hands of a few. Somebody who owns that much of any State's land has the ability to determine that State's destiny. It gets even worse if that landowner is not a corporation or a nonprofit or an individual or a family but, instead, a sovereign government that declares itself exempt from taxation and disallows the people from doing anything on that land without its permission, growing more penurious by the day in whom they allow onto the land and to do what. This conversation is long overdue, and it is situations like this where the Senator from Washington tragically was unable, unwilling even to allow these tiny crumbs to drop from the table of the large Federal trough. This is wrong. Her arguments are indefensible, suggesting that somehow anyone who doesn't vote for this continuing resolution, negotiated in secret by exactly two Senators, that she knows darn well can't pass--otherwise, they would be passing it right away. It can't pass because it has deep flaws in it. For her to blame those few of us who voted against it because of those serious problems and the way it was written and the fact that we are now being told that the leader is filling the tree, which means that we are not going to have any effective opportunity even to amend the bill--this is the same bill that was released to us about 30 minutes before we were called to vote on it, about 80 pages of dense reading material that includes countless cross-references; takes at least, I don't know, 48 hours even with trained staff, who are trained to look through these things, to really understand what is in them. Shame on all of us if we think this is a legitimate process, and shame on this institution if it thinks it is OK to treat Western States, where most of the land is Federal, this badly. I will be back. I yield the floor.